- Frustrations over election conspiracy theories sparked the resignation of an award-winning township clerk
- The clerk encourages those who are suspicious about vote rigging to attend a tabulator accuracy test
- Those tests are held in every community in Michigan before each election
COURTLAND TOWNSHIP — Sue Hartman loves her job as a township clerk in Kent County. She’s good at it — she won a statewide Spirit of MTA award from the Michigan Townships Association this year.
And she’s quitting.
Spending more time with her now-retired husband sounds appealing to the 68-year-old. But the main reason she’s leaving is frustration over an embedded belief among many of the 9,300 residents of this township northeast of Grand Rapids that elections are rigged.
“It’s frustrating, when you have to constantly walk around and tell people, ‘No, no one is cheating,’” Hartman said.
Half of Americans do not have confidence in the accuracy of elections, according to a recent Gallup poll. Among Democrats, 63% had confidence in the honesty of elections, compared to 37% among Republicans and 35% among independents.
The Republican candidates for US Senate, Mike Rogers, and for governor, John James, have both at times suggested that Michigan elections may have not been fair. This spring, Rogers said President Donald Trump was right to keep investigating the 2020 election.
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James said he got “screwed” in a 2020 election for US Senate against Gary Peters. Rogers also suggested in 2025 that a “van in Detroit with ballots” cost him his 2024 Senate bid against Elissa Slotkin.
On the front lines of that fight are clerks in Michigan’s 1,240 townships, which, along with cities, are the primary government entities managing elections. Criticism over elections is increasing the stress of township clerks, many of whom are low-paid, part-time employees. The stress from elections — both managing them and being accused of changing votes — is making it more difficult for townships to recruit and retain clerks and other elected positions.
For example, there are 10 township clerk positions on the November ballot for which no one is running. Townships can appoint people to fill the normally elected positions if no one runs, but finding qualified people willing to accept appointments can be difficult.
Hartman said it’s common for her to get emails and phone calls from some of the residents of Courtland Township accusing her of rigging elections.
Hartman, a Republican in a Republican-dominated community, says she tries to explain that Michigan’s voting system makes it difficult for anyone to cheat.
“Oh my God, you can’t get away with anything,” Hartman said. “And even if you try to get away with something, the people you work with are going to see you.”
Before each election, every jurisdiction that hosts voting sites must hold a public logic and accuracy test to ensure that its tabulators are accurately tabulating votes.
Despite conspiracy theories, few bother to show up to examine the machinery.
“The most we’ve ever had is 14,” Hartman said. “And that was right after 2020.”
Tabulators must be programmed to inform a voter if a ballot is blank or if the voter has voted for too many candidates for one office.
In Courtland on Tuesday, MaKayla Burns, a support specialist for ElectionSource, a company that helps service election equipment, demonstrated how a ballot with overvotes is rejected by the township’s tabulators. On another sample ballot, markings near but not inside the ellipsis for a candidate were not counted as a vote.
Burns ran a deck of about 50 sample ballots through a tabulator, then printed out a tape with the recorded tabulator count in each race to check against a master count.
A matter of trust
A person observing the demonstration checked the tabulation and confirmed its accuracy.
That person was Casey Triblo, a Comstock Park resident who said he’d been assigned to observe the accuracy test by the Michigan Republican Party.
Triblo took photos of the tabulator count as well as the serial number for the machine used for the test. These tabulators were manufactured by Liberty Vote, formerly known as Dominion. Dominion was at the center of false claims of fraud during the 2020 presidential election, when Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump both nationally and, narrowly, in Michigan.
“You never heard any complaints before 2020,” Hartman said. “I was a poll worker in 2016, nobody ever complained, and the system is only more secure (now) than it was back then.”
Hartman, who formerly worked in the banking industry, was appointed clerk in 2019 and won elections for the post in 2020 and 2024. This summer, she told the township board she would leave office at the end of the year, partly because she was tired of dealing with election deniers.
“It can get very nasty,” she told Bridge. “All the clerks put up with it.”
Sometimes, when she’s able to walk them through the process, “some people will hug me and say ‘I was wrong,’” Hartman said. “Then they’ll say, ‘Well, I know you’re doing it right, but those people in Detroit, they’re doing it wrong.’
“Come on! We’re all trained by the same people on the same equipment.”
Triblo, the volunteer sent to Courtland by the Republican party, is a skeptic.
The retired surgical nurse said he had read that some election machinery miscounted votes in the 2020 election.
“I don’t trust anyone anymore,” he told Bridge.
Triblo asked to take photos of the serial numbers of all of the township’s tabulators, and for a list detailing for which of the township’s three precincts each of the machines would be used on Election Day. Hartman denied the request.
During the accuracy test, Triblo ran through several pages of questions regarding how the testing was being performed, from asking whether the tabulator was an “optical or a digital scan device,” to “Is this the final certified software that you are testing?”
“Voting integrity is so important,” Triblo told Bridge. “Ever since 2020, half the country thought the election was stolen.”
After the test, Triblo acknowledged that the tabulators and the people running them “think of everything.”
“The more safeguards we can have, the better,” he said.
People get ‘sucked in’
Kimberly McIntyre, a Courtland Township trustee, told Bridge she is devastated by Hartman’s impending resignation.
“We are losing one heck of a person,” McIntyre said in an email to Bridge. “She is tired of being accused of rigged elections.
“People just sit and watch (TV) and get sucked in, and they don’t do anything about getting educated,” she said. “These people who are complaining about elections have no idea how they’re actually run. There’s no way to switch those numbers.”
Hartman encourages those with questions about how votes are counted to attend an accuracy test in their community. She also urges skeptics to volunteer as a poll worker on Election Day to see how it’s done.
“Most of the time, if they’re disbelieving, they will come work as an election worker, and by the time they walk out, they understand,” Hartman said. “They see the process and see how you can’t screw it up.”
The township hasn’t found anyone yet to replace Hartman. She’s told the township board she will stay on in an appointed, part-time position if they can’t find a new clerk by January.
“I love the place,” Hartman said. “I will not leave the township in the lurch, but I also will not be an everyday employee.”
She’s hoping, though, that they find someone before the next election rolls around and her voicemail is once again filled with “disinformation and illusions of fraud and the craziness out there,” she said.
“People just want to believe all this garbage.”
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