'I fear for the county': MAGA election deniers accused of tearing apart Michigan community

A dramatic power struggle is now unfolding in Antrim County, Michigan — a small county of about 25,000 people on the shores of the Grand Traverse Bay — reported CBS News, and it's been triggered by former President Donald Trump's conspiracy theories about election-rigging.

Sheryl Guy, the local county clerk, has been working for more than 40 years and was planning to retire, but she's horrified by developments in the race to succeed her, with five Republican candidates running, one of the most prominent being Victoria Bishop, the wife of a local right-wing talk radio host and an avid conspiracy theorist who has specifically accused Guy of cooking election results.

Antrim County, which is a resort area and leans Republican, originally reported a Democratic landslide in 2020 due to a tallying error. That was swiftly corrected, but became a source of a conspiracy theory that a plot to rig the Michigan election originated from there.

Guy says that she plans to run a write-in campaign if Bishop wins the primary. "I fear for the taxpayers and the county becoming part of their agenda," she told reporters. "I can't just turn over an office that I have worked in for over 45 years to an election conspiracist."

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Trump's baseless allegations that the 2020 election was rigged have led to local campaigns to terrorize election officials all over the country.

One of the most notorious involved Stephen Richer, a Republican local elections recorder in crucial Maricopa County, Arizona, who was for years subject to abuse and threats and recently lost his primary to a MAGA candidate. In another case, the entire election staff of Gillespie County, a heavily Republican community in the Texas Hill Country, was driven to resign by abuse from election deniers even though Trump won the county handily.