![]() A little over two thousand Trump votes had been shifted to Biden’s column. So when the numbers started rolling in, they dropped into the wrong columns. When she added that last-minute candidate for village trustee to the ballots, she should have updated the counting machines with the new parameters. The days that followed were a blur of meetings and calls with county attorneys and software programmers, and through the haze, a thought gradually dawned in Guy’s mind: I did this. On November 6, the New York Post published a story that began, “President Trump’s supporters are pointing to a small Michigan county as evidence that vote-counting software used in the state may undercut Trump’s number of votes.” But by now, the world had noticed something was off kilter in Antrim County. Sheryl Guy took down the published numbers and tried to regroup. Now the totals showed more than eighteen thousand votes, which was two thousand too many. Then they republished the results, which now showed Trump as victor.īut a new problem arose. So all day, she and her staff totaled up votes directly from the official tape printed at each precinct and entered that by hand into the central computer. They probably weren’t talking to each other right. ![]() What could’ve happened? She suspected a culprit: computers. That sounded confident enough, but inwardly she felt baffled. “Until then, we are asking all interested parties to bear with us while we get to the bottom of this.” “By this afternoon, we expect to have a clear answer and a clear plan of action addressing any issue,” she said. She quickly put out a statement on Antrim’s official Facebook page. Finally, after picking up the McMuffins, she gunned her car toward the county building. She wanted to race to the office but could only sit trapped in the drive-through. ![]() That kind of sudden shift in long-standing voting patterns signaled a problem, and the realization awoke Guy like a shock of cold water. The results she had posted, unofficially, showed Joe Biden beating Donald Trump by about 3,200 votes, which would be nearly impossible in a county as reliably Republican as Antrim. The short message was ominous: “Things don’t look right.” Between placing her order and arriving at the pickup window, she received an email from an early-rising citizen who had seen reports of the presidential vote in Antrim. Along the way she stopped at McDonald’s to buy breakfast for the girls, who wanted sausage and egg McMuffins. She said a brief good morning to Alan, a machinist, then gave him a goodbye peck and drove back toward her office. She registered, vaguely, that Joe Biden had won the presidential vote. But she felt too weary to even note how many votes she got. She knew she, a Republican, had won reelection as county clerk because she ran unopposed. Guy had spent hour after hour peering at the columns and rows and, by the end, was too tired to step back, figuratively, and consider a broader view of the election. They finished just before 5:00 a.m., in total exhaustion. Guy voted to reelect both Trump and herself. There was a last-minute change, adding a candidate for village trustee to the ballot, but people voted without confusion or incident. People across the county voted on issues specific to their villages-on school boards, on a proposed marijuana shop-and bigger questions like the US presidency. Michigan counties are divided into grid-like townships, which are home to what they call villages: Elk Rapids village, Central Lake village, and so forth. It’s a small county, so on Election Day she and her staff of four handled election duties along with the everyday responsibilities: collecting court fees, paying the county’s bills, certifying births and marriages. The people of Antrim had elected her for the job eight years earlier, and she loved it. Now Guy was almost sixty and county clerk herself. For thirty-one years she worked under the previous county clerk, whom she viewed as a mother figure and who granted Sheryl-maiden name Kirts then-a license to marry her high school sweetheart, Alan. She worked her way up and sat in every chair in the building along the way: clerk 1 and 2, deputy 1 and 2, chief deputy, administrator. She graduated from the local high school on a Friday, and the next Monday she started work in the county building as a receptionist. In a concrete-block room, here in the Antrim County Building, her own birth certificate sits in a chunky black binder: Baby Sheryl Ann, born May 1961, eight pounds and ten ounces. Life had carried the Antrim county clerk toward this moment since her first breath in a sense.
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