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      Newsom Urges Michigan Democrats to Stay Calm and Support Biden

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      Gov. Gavin Newsom of California told angsty Michigan Democrats on Thursday that President Biden had been engaged and all in on his re-election campaign during a White House meeting a day before. And Mr. Newsom suggested, gently, that party activists take a deep breath and rally behind the incumbent.“What I need to convince you of is not to be fatalistic, not to fall prey to all this negativity,” Mr. Newsom told more than 300 fellow Democrats who had gathered on the Fourth of July holiday in South Haven, Mich. Democrats have had a brutal week since Mr. Biden’s rocky debate performance last week, and calls for him to exit the race have exposed rifts within the party.Mr. Newsom came to Michigan, a crucial swing state, as a surrogate campaigning for Mr. Biden. But it was hard to ignore the fact that he was also among the leading names being circulated as a potential replacement candidate — along with the Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer.Mr. Newsom on Thursday did not veer from the party line that Mr. Biden remained the nominee and that Democrats were not interested in replacing him. The California governor did not so much as hint that he was interested in the job.“I believe in this man,” Mr. Newsom said. “I believe in his character. I believe that he has been one of the most transformative presidents in our collective lifetime.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gretchen Whitmer wants to meet far-right plotters who tried to kill her, book reveals

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      Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan widely spoken of as a possible Democratic candidate for president should Joe Biden cede to growing pressure and leave the race, wants to meet members of a far-right militia who plotted to kidnap and kill her.“I asked whether I could meet with one of the handful of plotters who’d pleaded guilty and taken responsibility for their actions, just to talk,” Whitmer writes in a new book, of the plot motivated by resistance to Covid public health measures and revealed with 13 arrests in late 2020.The attorney general of Michigan, Dana Nessel, said it might be possible to talk to the plotters, Whitmer writes, though it has not happened, due to “all the various trials and appeals.“But I do look forward to being able to sit and talk, face-to-face. To ask the questions and really hear the answers. And hopefully to take some small step toward understanding.”As described by Nessel’s office, the affair of the “Wolverine Watchmen” resulted in “20 state felonies against eight individuals alleged to have engaged in the planning and training for an operation to attack the state Capitol and kidnap government officials.” Five men were convicted.Federal charges were filed against six more men, four of whom were convicted. Two pled guilty to conspiracy charges and co-operated with prosecutors.Whitmer describes the plot, and how she coped with it and other threats from the armed pro-Trump far right, in True Gretch: What I’ve Learned About Life, Leadership, and Everything in Between. The book will be published in the US next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Given Whitmer’s presence in the ranks of proposed replacements for Biden after the president’s disastrous debate against Donald Trump escalated Democratic panic last week, the governor’s book will be eagerly read.Whitmer has said she does not want to replace Biden but that has not stopped speculation. On Wednesday, she was due to be among Democratic governors meeting Biden at the White House.Though True Gretch is a standard campaign-oriented biography – perhaps intended as a marker for a run in 2028 – Whitmer does not shy from describing the violent plot against her.Describing plotters’ threats such as “Grab the fuckin’ governor, just grab the bitch” and “Just cap her”, she considers the toll taken on her husband and daughters as well as on herself.She describes how her husband was forced by threats to close his dental practice; how her two daughters have refused to go back to a family cottage the plotters were revealed to have “scoped out”; and her own disappointment when two men were acquitted.Despite it all, showing willingness to bridge the sort of jagged partisan divide that affects the battleground state of Michigan, and the US as a whole, Whitmer insists she wants to talk to those who wanted to kill her.Elsewhere in the book, the governor does shy away from one thing: open discussion of any ambitions for national office.In fairness, True Gretch was written before Biden’s hold on the presidency began to be seriously questioned by Democratic politicians, pundits and strategists, concerned that at 81 the former senator and vice-president is proving himself too old to beat Trump and serve a second term.Whitmer’s readers, however, may spot allusions to higher ambitions now thrown into sharp relief.Chapter four, describing Whitmer’s first steps as governor of Michigan and the challenge of dealing with extreme cold weather, is titled “Surround Yourself with Great People – and Don’t Be Afraid To Ask For Help”.In Chapter 10, Whitmer describes how she prepares for campaign debates, the sort of challenge Biden failed so starkly.Whitmer’s chapter title is “Be a Happy Warrior” – a label defined by dictionary.com as “a person … undiscouraged by difficulties or opposition” and in US politics perennially linked to Alfred E Smith, Hubert Humphrey, Ronald Reagan and others who ran for president with a determinedly optimistic message.In her epilogue, Whitmer moves from Reagan to another Republican: Theodore Roosevelt. In “every campaign, and during every term I serve”, she writes, she shares the 26th president’s “Man in the Arena” speech.In that speech, given in Paris in April 1910, Roosevelt said: “It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”Whitmer’s use of the quote may strike a chord with Democrats panicked by Biden and now looking the governor’s way. So might what Whitmer writes next.“Though these words were written more than a hundred years ago, they’re just as true today – except for two things. The “man” may be a woman. And she may just be wearing fuchsia.” More

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      Some States Say They Can’t Afford Ozempic and Other Weight Loss Drugs

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      Public employees in West Virginia who took the drugs lost weight and were healthier, and some are despondent that the state is canceling a program to help pay for them.Joanna Bailey, a family physician and obesity specialist, doesn’t want to tell her patients that they can’t take Wegovy, but she has gotten used to it.Around a quarter of the people she sees in her small clinic in Wyoming County would benefit from the weight-loss medications known as GLP-1s, which also include Ozempic, Zepbound and Mounjaro, she says. The drugs have helped some of them lose 15 to 20 percent of their weight. But most people in the area she serves don’t have insurance that covers the cost, and virtually no one can afford sticker prices of $1,000 to $1,400 a month.“Even my richest patients can’t afford it,” Dr. Bailey said. She then mentioned something that many doctors in West Virginia — among the poorest states in the country, with the highest prevalence of obesity, at 41 percent — say: “We’ve separated between the haves and the have-nots.”Such disparities sharpened in March when West Virginia’s Public Employees Insurance Agency, which pays most of the cost of prescription drugs for more than 75,000 teachers, municipal workers and other public employees and their families, canceled a pilot program to cover weight-loss drugs.Some private insurers help pay for medications to treat obesity, but most Medicaid programs do so only to manage diabetes, and Medicare covers Wegovy and Zepbound only when they are prescribed for heart problems.Over the past year, states have been trying, amid rising demand, to determine how far to extend coverage for public employees. Connecticut is on track to spend more than $35 million this year through a limited weight-loss coverage initiative. In January, North Carolina announced that it would stop paying for weight-loss medications after forking out $100 million for them in 2023 — 10 percent of its spending on prescription drugs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Thousands of Michigan Residents Weather Days Without Power During Heat Wave

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      As storms battered southeast Michigan this week, Lindsey Brenz heard trees crashing and saw bright flashes of lightning through her windows. Then, she heard a pop and the monotone drone of what she suspected was a power surge.“I thought, ‘Oh gosh, this is not going to be good,’” she said.Ms. Brenz, 32, was one of 69,000 customers who lost power Wednesday night after powerful storms downed trees and toppled power lines — compounding the effects of an intense heat wave that has scorched the Midwest and other areas of the country.Three days after the outage, about 7,000 customers are still without power, according to DTE Energy, a Detroit-based utilities company that serves the area. Detroit has suffered temperatures in the 90s since the heat wave began on Monday. The heat index, a measure of how conditions feel with humidity factored in, reached 95 degrees on Saturday afternoon.Ms. Brenz’s biggest concern was keeping herself and her cat, Bubba, safe from the sweltering conditions during the outage. She closed her windows, drew the blinds and refrained from showering to keep her house in Berkley cool.“It was the little things I had to be aware of to keep me and my cat safe,” said Ms. Brenz, who works for a nonprofit.Deb Dworkin, a 52-year-old human resources manager, lives in a bungalow in Berkley. She said her upstairs bedroom got “crazy hot” during the outage. She slept on her couch for two days, using a battery-powered travel fan and a neck towel filled with ice cubes.“I probably looked ridiculous,” she said.Michael Reiterman, a 25-year-old assistant financial planner who lives in New Baltimore, tried similar remedies in his home, including shutting the blinds to keep out the heat. But his ultimate solution was to shuttle between his home, which had outages intermittently, and his fiancée’s house, which maintained power through the week.The country has so far been spared widespread blackouts amid the heat wave, which heightened demand for electricity and put pressure on the grid’s infrastructure. Experts say that’s a promising sign that the grid will be able to handle intense heat waves later in the summer.But the difficulties faced by the Michigan residents demonstrate the risks of power outages that coincide with heat waves — regardless of whether the outages are caused directly by the heat.To help mitigate those risks, DTE Energy is planning to invest about $9 billion over the next five years to “harden” the grid to weather the effects of climate change, said Brian Calka, vice president of the company’s distribution operations business unit. “The weather patterns that we’re seeing right now are fundamentally different from what we’ve seen in recent memory,” he said. “It’s a call to action.”Sophia Lada More

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      Republican-Led States Push to Expand Power to Curb Immigration

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      Republicans’ latest efforts capitalize on the issue’s prominence in the 2024 election. But the fate of their proposals is still being litigated.Nearly a year since Texas adopted a law empowering state and local police officers to arrest undocumented migrants who cross into its territory, Republican lawmakers in at least 11 states have tried to adopt similar measures, capitalizing on the prominence of immigration in the 2024 presidential election.The fate of the proposals — six have been enacted or are under consideration, with Louisiana expected to sign its measure into law as early as next week — is still being litigated. In a case before a federal appeals court, Texas is defending its law by arguing that illegal immigration is a form of invasion, allowing it to expand its power to protect its borders. Federal courts have previously ruled that, from a constitutional perspective, the definition of the term invasion is limited to military attacks.States have tested the limits of their power over immigration before, but lawyers and legal scholars said the push this year was accompanied by what had amounted to a public-relations campaign.In campaign speeches, political ads and the halls of Congress, more Republicans are echoing former President Donald J. Trump by arguing that the rise of migration at the southern border is an “invasion.” President Biden, under pressure from both Republicans and Democrats to tackle the issues at the border, signed an executive order this month to curb asylum, and he could have more actions coming next week.The measure expected to be signed by Gov. Jeff Landry, Republican of Louisiana, includes provisions allowing Mr. Landry and his attorney general to establish a compact with Texas to address border security. Mr. Landry has already met with Gov. Greg Abbott, Republican of Texas, and dispatched Army National Guard soldiers from Louisiana to Texas’ border with Mexico.Valarie Hodges, the state senator in Louisiana who wrote the legislation, joined other Republicans in calling Mr. Biden’s recent action “too little, too late,” saying in an interview that state measures like hers were essential because the Biden administration had failed to enforce immigration laws.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kamala Harris Expected to Blast Trump at Party Dinner in Michigan

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      In one of her first campaign appearances since former President Donald J. Trump was convicted of falsifying business records, Vice President Kamala Harris sharply criticized him on Saturday as a “cheater” who believes himself above the law and argued that he should be disqualified for the presidency.Ms. Harris, who headlined a state Democratic Party dinner in downtown Detroit, rebuffed Mr. Trump’s false claims that his trial, like the 2020 presidential election, was “rigged” and defended the judicial process behind his felony conviction.“Simply put, Donald Trump thinks he is above the law,” she said. “This should be disqualifying for anyone who wants to be president of the United States.”The speech on Saturday evening capped a day of campaigning across Michigan, a crucial battleground state. Ms. Harris was accompanied by the actress Octavia Spencer, attending a fund-raiser in Ann Arbor and stopping at a Black-owned bookstore in Ypsilanti.In Detroit, the vice president opened her speech with remarks about the war in Gaza. As she tried to describe the Biden administration’s monthslong efforts to negotiate a cease-fire deal, a protester stood up and shouted at her and was quickly removed from the ballroom. Ms. Harris’s response was stern: “I value and respect your voice, but I’m speaking right now.”She then continued her speech. “We have been working every day to bring an end to this conflict in a way that ensures Israel is secure, brings home all hostages, ends ongoing suffering for Palestinian people and ensures that Palestinians can enjoy their right to self-determination, dignity and freedom,” she said. “As President Biden said last week, it is time for this war to end.”Turning to the election, Ms. Harris, the former top prosecutor of California, accused Mr. Trump of attacking “the foundations of our justice system.” She said that the former president was convicted by a jury of 12 Americans who were selected in part by his defense team, and that his lawyers had a chance to present their side of the evidence.“You know why he complains? Because the reality is cheaters don’t like getting caught,” she said.A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The event took place in a key swing state with heightened stakes. President Biden won Michigan’s primary in February, 81 percent to 13 percent, prevailing over a movement that urged Democrats to vote “uncommitted” on the ballot in protest of his support for Israel. But more than 100,000 voters took that stance against him, among them progressives, young people and many in the state’s large and politically active Arab American community. Mr. Biden’s campaign has also been seeking to shore up its support among Black voters in cities like Detroit.Mr. Trump won Michigan by nearly 11,000 votes in 2016, and lost it to Mr. Biden by more than 150,000 votes in his 2020 re-election bid. Mr. Trump focused on the voting in Michigan in his efforts to subvert the 2020 election. More

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      She was in Trump’s Maga ‘cult’ – now she’s fighting far-right extremism

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      While dozens of her neighbors piled into buses bound from Michigan for the US Capitol on 6 January, 2021, Penny Swan, a local Republican party activist and an outspoken Trump supporter, stayed home. But not for lack of enthusiasm: Swan wanted to join the throngs fighting to stop the certification of the 2020 election, but has a heart condition and worried about her ability to keep up.Instead, she watched social media in awe, as her friends and neighbors surged toward the Capitol.That was then.Since 2021, Swan, a medical equipment manager, has distanced herself from the rightwing group that organized the 6 January buses from her small, ruby-red town of Hillsdale, Michigan. Swan’s formerly close friends in the movement have become political rivals. And come November, she won’t vote for Trump.In an age of deepening political polarization, Swan’s story, of going deep into the Maga movement and defecting, is a rare one.According to a 2022 Pew study, “partisan antipathy” – deep dislike among members of a political party for the opposing group – has deepened in the US in the last decade. Democrats and Republicans are more likely today than 10 years ago to characterize each other as “unintelligent” and “close minded”. And Republicans who identify strongly with their party tend to prefer Trump overwhelmingly, as evidenced in the Republican primaries, which the former president swept.As the operator of a popular local politics page online and a longtime political activist, Swan has not only evolved as a voter. She has also documented, and at times participated in the unravelling of her county’s conservative movement – which, like the state Republican party, has gone to war with itself over far-right politics.View image in fullscreenA decade before 2,000 of Trump’s most diehard supporters stormed the Capitol, Swan, a lifelong Republican and Hillsdale resident, began documenting local government meetings. Some meetings were livestreamed, but not all – including meetings of the county commissioners.“I thought people needed to see the entire truth,” said Swan. “You could read something in the newspaper and that had a narrative, you could hear something on the radio, and that had a narrative, but it didn’t have the whole story. So I thought people should actually be able to see the entire process.”For years, Swan recorded and uploaded every meeting of local government she could attend on to her Facebook page, a repository of citizen journalism and pissed-off commentary called Penny Swan Political Activist Facts Matter. With more than 1,400 followers – in a town of about 8,000 – Swan’s page has become an important clearinghouse for political updates and a hub for heated debate, offering a window into the fraught world of Michigan conservative politics.In the wake of the 2020 election, the Republican party of Michigan – a swing state that flipped from Trump to Joe Biden in 2020 – saw a widening rift between the party’s establishment and its fired-up Maga base. The split spilled into the county Republican party chapters, with local party organizations devolving into factions. In Hillsdale, a group of Republican activists aligned with the Trump wing of the party created an informal caucus within the party chapter.The Hillsdale group – since dubbed the America First Republicans – aimed to change the local party “from neo-conservatism, your old establishment, George Bush-type crowd, to more of a modern day conservative group”, said Jon Smith, who helped form the caucus in late 2019. The idea, Smith said, was to turn the local GOP from what he viewed as a sleepy and bureaucratic organization into a mobilized one.View image in fullscreenSwan was excited when Smith approached her about a new, more active formation in the local party. It sounded like the perfect opportunity to ramp up her political work.“Those guys were like, ‘Oh, we’re going to take over the party, and we’re going to do more good stuff,’” said Swan. “And I’m like, ‘that sounds good. I’m coming because I want to do something and be proactive.’”And they did: in 2020, Daren Wiseley, an ally of the rightwing faction, was elected chairman of the Republican party of Hillsdale county. Swan continued to work with the party, taking on the role of deputy treasurer and joining the organization’s executive committee. The group was close-knit. They confided in each other about personal matters and hung out after meetings. Swan even spent holidays with Smith’s family.It’s not clear exactly when the relationship began to sour. By Smith’s account, Swan just wasn’t up for the job of deputy treasurer.“When our treasurer quit, [Swan] was the deputy treasurer and we were behind on filing reports,” said Smith. “That kind of pressure, Penny couldn’t handle it.”Swan has a different story. She says she raised concerns about the organization’s handling of finances, which the executives were unable, or unwilling, to address. In a 7 April 2022 email to former chairman Wiseley, Swan resigned.“It is with deep regret that I feel the need to step down as deputy treasurer,” wrote Swan. “I have spoken with you, Vice-Chairman Lashaway and also Secretary Smith about my concerns often over the past six months, to no avail.”Four months later, as the county party prepared for their annual convention, Swan’s old friends purged dozens of members who they viewed as insufficiently loyal to the Maga right. During the convention, armed security guards blocked those delegates, who had been formally “disavowed”, from entering. The standoff in the convention parking lot laid bare the divisions that had been festering in the organization for months and set the stage for a protracted legal battle over the rightful leaders of the Hillsdale county GOP. A court in 2022 found the America First faction could not rightfully claim to represent the county party, a victory for Swan’s faction.To her former friends in the Hillsdale Republican party, Swan is a turncoat – her defection, a betrayal.To others in the community, Swan is a rare ally with an inside view of the far right.“She was kind of brainwashed,” said Gail McClanahan, a Hillsdale county resident who led a successful recall campaign to unseat Stephanie Scott, an election-denying township clerk 2023. “Not now. Penny, she’s not scared,” said McClanahan. “She’s keeping us informed of the truth here in Hillsdale.”Swan’s split from the America First group, she says, was like leaving a “cult”. After she left and began criticizing the group online, her relationships with former friends in the group grew bitter. Swan says she even faced harassment and threats over her new political alignment.View image in fullscreenIn a letter sent to a close contact of Swan’s, someone who identified himself as “Lance” alleged that Swan had “spread hate, lies and misfortune”, and warned that “this is my only and last chance to save her from herself […] I cannot be held responsible for doing what needs to be done in defending my friends who do not deserve what she is doing to them”. Swan filed a police report and installed cameras in her apartment.In April 2022, Swan launched a campaign for an open seat on the city council, running on a pro-transparency platform. The race turned nasty.When a bitter fight broke out over the placement of children’s books with LGBTQ+ themes in the local library, Swan defended the librarian and the books. A meme circulated online, shared by her former friends, calling Swan a pedophile.In an email to the Guardian, Jessica Spangler, a former Hillsdale librarian, said the protracted controversy sparked “a considerable decline in my health, resulting in serious and lasting issues due to the undue stress endured during my tenure”.Joshua Paladino, a rightwing graduate student at Hillsdale College who called for the removal of books from the library, won the open seat.Swan suffered a third heart attack in December 2022, prompting her to back off from political work. She no longer films at every city council meeting, and says she is trying to resist the pull of vitriolic online arguments.But her goal is the same: to resist the current of rightwing extremism that has come to define politics in her town and county.She has found some allies in the Republican party, like Scott Sessions, a member of the Hillsdale county GOP and the former mayor of Hillsdale.“To me, it’s not really conservative,” Sessions said about the America First group. “It’s turned radical.”With elections coming up on 6 August for numerous county seats, Swan is helping out on a few campaigns that she sees as critical to fending off the far-right push. Two stand out in particular: an election for county sheriff, pitting the incumbent Republican against Jon Rutan, a self-proclaimed “constitutional sheriff”, and a race for county clerk, between Abe Dane, the current director of elections, and Stephanie Scott, who was recalled from a former post for embracing election conspiracy theories.The looming elections have Swan back on the politics beat.“When I get up at five o’clock in the morning, I’m reading and writing until I go to work,” said Swan. “For the most part, as soon as I get home at 2.30 or 3, I’m working on it till I go to bed.” More

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      ‘There’s no fraud here’: how a Republican official is addressing election denialism in his rural county

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      Abe Dane would be the first to admit he had concerns about election fraud during the 2020 election. He believed the elections in his own county, where he had worked the polls, were clean – but he wasn’t sure about other counties in the state, where unfounded claims of fraud swirled in 2020.That was before he took a position in local election administration. Now, with first-hand experience, Dane, the director of elections in Hillsdale county, Michigan, is confident in the process.It’s convincing others that’s the challenge now.Since 2020, deep-red Hillsdale county has been a flashpoint for election anxieties. Stephanie Scott, the elections clerk from Adams Township – one of the offices in Dane’s jurisdiction – earned the attention of figures in Donald Trump’s inner circle as she spread false claims of fraud and refused orders by the secretary of state’s office to turn over voting equipment for regular maintenance. Scott was ousted in a recall campaign by activists who were fed up with her insistence on spreading the false claim that the last election was stolen from Trump.On 8 May, the Michigan attorney general, Dana Nessel, announced felony charges against Scott and her attorney, Stefanie Lambert, for allegedly turning over private voter data from the 2020 election to an unauthorized third party.Meanwhile, Scott has filed paperwork to challenge Dane in his fall election for Hillsdale county clerk.The Guardian spoke with Abe Dane about running an elections office during troubled political times – and his own shifting view of election security.View image in fullscreenIn a more conservative area, like Hillsdale, where people know that their neighbors are mostly going to be voting along a certain party line, do you still see the same kind of politicization around election administration as elsewhere? What does that look like for you, in a conservative town, as an elected Republican?Being a Republican and administering elections, I’m pushing back on that [politicization]. I try my best when I’m at township meetings, or city meetings, to choose my words carefully.I guess when I first started, I was a little bit more cautious. Here’s an example: I would say, “In Hillsdale county, there is no election fraud going on. We are doing things right in this county.” I’d always say “in this county”. I’ve gotten to the point now where I personally believe that our elections nationwide are completely fine. And so I’m starting to stop that, and to stop trying not to offend my fellow Republicans in my county. I’ll just say flat out, like, “I don’t think there was election fraud anywhere. I think people have a different worldview than you and you can’t accept that.”You mentioned earlier you had doubts about the election and concerns about election fraud, but it sounds like your view now has shifted. Can you tell me about that evolution?Well, to start with, in 2020 and before, I wasn’t in county government at all.I began to be an election inspector in the 2020 elections, and I knew things were on the up-and-up here. I didn’t have any questions about our own county. But I had questions about, you know, Detroit or Wayne county – things like that. As I got into election administration, I started seeing the processes, the checks and balances, the security that’s involved, and got familiar with a qualified voter file – the state’s voter registration system – and how they manage that list.There’s no good training to be an election administrator that’s from an accredited school. So, our education comes from our peers, and our associations – I’m rubbing shoulders with the elections director in Wayne county and [officials] all over the state, and we’re developing these relationships, and I’m saying, “You know, these are people just like me.” They care about their voters, they care about everyone having access to the polls. They care about making sure everything balances, and every vote is counted. And there’s no partisanship in that.Clerks should be non-partisan, because all we care about is allowing people to have access to the voting process.So no, there’s no fraud here.Given that you are part of this community, do you think that your evolution on this has given some credibility to election processes, with you having seen it from the inside and being able to communicate about it?I wish I had that much influence. It’s really just the people that are in my circle, that know me on a personal level, that I would have that kind of an impact on. So unfortunately, it’s not like that.No, it’s a battle that all of us election administrators have to fight – to help people understand what we’re trying to do and the process that’s in place to keep it accurate and honest. It’s going to take time and this election coming up – depending on how it goes – it might set us back another number of years in trying to get people to the point where they can trust our elections.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAmong our clerks and election inspectors, there are a good percentage of them that actually have concerns about people causing trouble in the precinct on these big elections. We’re working with our local law enforcement to try and visit the precincts, and even this one I had yesterday, I talked to the sheriff and I said: “It would go a long way if you just popped in there. It’s just one little precinct open, but they would love to see you there sometime.” And he did.Now that we’re getting a little bit closer to the election, what types of security threats are you preparing for? Or does it not feel that tense here?I would like to say it doesn’t feel that tense here, but we need to be prepared for anything.So we’re getting ready to do our inspector training – every election inspector in our county that will be working all the precincts in August and November will need to take their two-year recertification, and I’ll be doing that. So it’s a big ordeal. It takes two months to go through and I think there’s close to 300 people that we have to train.And in that, [security] is going to be one of the things that we talk about – and that’s the preparation. It’s: OK, what if this happens, what do you do? Who do you call?If I have the time, which is difficult with my time restraints right now, I’m trying to develop a document that will help facilitate communication if something does happen – whether it’s security, or whether it’s a weather issue, to facilitate communication between myself and the clerk’s office and the sheriff’s department or central dispatch, 911 operation and any county maintenance and stuff to be able to get things orchestrated, if we have to change a precinct location or if we have to deal with emergency in a precinct.View image in fullscreenAs the 2024 general election approaches, at the national and also local level, people who rejected the results of the 2020 election are getting more active. What’s been the most effective way that you’ve been able to push back against election denialism?I would say the most effective way is to have the time to be able to go out in the community and talk at public events or clubs and organizations and even the township and city meetings, and just give presentations to give that information about how our processes work.I’ve seen in other communities where they have more staff, and more time, where they can invite people in and have trainings just for the community on elections – not necessarily to make them inspectors, but to just teach them about the processes and inviting them in to conduct audits of an election precinct voluntarily.On a different subject, I am curious – is Stephanie Scott campaigning against you? Is that election a concern?To be honest, I’m not losing sleep over it. I put a lot of time and effort, blood, sweat and tears into this place. So I want to win. But if I lose, then I have a market where I can easily find another job that pays better and is less stressful and less hours. So it’s a win-win either way for me.So you’d stay in election administration?I do love election administration. And I love this community. And I want my family to grow up here. So yeah, I want to stick it out. More