Far-right election clerk caught illegally purging voter rolls: report

An election clerk in a far-right Michigan county has been purging voter rolls without authorization, Votebeat reported on Tuesday.

According to the report, the Michigan Bureau of Elections "sent a letter to Antrim County Clerk Victoria Bishop on Tuesday saying it had received information suggesting she had made voter registration changes 'that fall outside the scope of your statutory authority and fail to comply with the law.'"

Bishop allegedly sent confirmation and cancelation notices to voters who had not participated in the last two elections, per the report — despite the fact, the letter noted, that “Michigan law is explicit that a clerk may not cancel, or cause the cancellation of, a voter’s registration solely because a voter has missed one or two elections.” She then altered the statuses of these voters in the Qualified Voter File, “without any agreement or delegation of authority allowing you to do so from the affected local jurisdiction.”

Bishop is a Republican who was first elected in 2024, and has ties to the Stop the Steal conspiracy theory movement that believes President Donald Trump was cheated out of winning in 2020.

"Angela Benander, a spokesperson for the Michigan Department of State, said that the bureau began looking into Bishop’s actions after receiving 'reports about concerning activity' from voters and local clerks alike," said the report. "From there, state officials looked at the QVF and found enough irregularities to prompt the requests to Bishop."

This is the latest in a series of improper actions taken by local pro-Trump officials to try to prove election rigging.

In the most famous case, Tina Peters, the clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, went to prison for a scheme to tamper with election equipment, and the Trump administration has been trying to bully the state to free her for months. More recently, Riverside County, California Sheriff Chad Bianco seized 650,000 ballots from the anti-Trump Proposition 50 referendum to investigate them for irregularities, but was ordered to stop by the California Supreme Court.