A dispute over voter rolls, elections law, and the power of a county clerk is unfolding in In Antrim County, just northeast of Traverse City.
Antrim County Clerk Victoria Bishop is accused of improperly changing the voting registration status of six residents. The Michigan Bureau of Elections has ordered Bishop to stop her actions.
And there’s a state police investigation into information security at Bishop’s office. That case also involves a local radio host, who happens to be Bishop's husband.
Austin Rowlader is covering this story. He's the producer and reporter for the Up North Lowdown from Interlochen Public Radio. He joined Michigan Public Morning Edition host Doug Tribou.
Doug Tribou: Antrim County Clerk Victoria Bishop has claimed that voting rolls in the county are loaded with people who aren’t eligible to vote — people who have died or moved away, for example. That’s something the state and local clerks dispute, by the way. What did she do to try to reduce the number of voters on the rolls?
Austin Rowlader: So she's taken a few actions since she's started to be in office in 2025. The first thing that she did was she sent out a mailer to about 1800 voters asking them to verify their address. And this is something that the State Bureau of Elections said that she's not supposed to be doing. This is the responsibility of local township clerks.
She has also made changes in the qualified voter files that she wasn't supposed to. Like you mentioned, she changed six voters' registration statuses to "cancel." We've also found about 14 changes total that she's made. We don't have a full list of changes that she's made, so this could be a very small portion of it.
But those two things, sending out these letters to voters and then making changes to the qualified voter files, are two things that the Bureau of Elections says that she's not supposed to be doing.
DT: And that seems to be pretty cut and dry, right? Like, those responsibilities fall to the clerks that voters deal with in their own communities, so the town clerk, the city clerk, that's where the power over those particular aspects of the files lies.
AR: Yeah. The laws are clear as to who is supposed to do what when it comes to the qualified voter files and county clerks don't have very much power to make changes. They delegate. They're supposed to flag some things and hand it over to local township clerks. So there really isn't any gray area for how this is working. And according to the Bureau of Elections, she's gone beyond what she's supposed to be doing.
"The laws are clear as to who is supposed to do what when it comes to the qualified voter files and county clerks don't have very much power to make changes."Austin Rowlader, Interlochen Public Radio
DT: I know that she's denying that she made changes to the rolls, despite the fact that you and your colleagues have published images where there are clearly changes to set these voters to "cancel" as their status. Is there any sense of why these six voters were marked up when others weren't?
AR: It's very hard to say. As you can see in our documents, all of the information about the voters was redacted. And so we don't really know anything about them. And I don't have any idea why those changes were made. Victoria has not been willing to talk to us about why she made those changes. And so we don't know.
DT: There's another unusual element to this story. In addition to being the Antrim County clerk, Victoria Bishop is also the owner of a local radio station, and her husband, Randy Bishop, is a talk show host on that station, where he goes by Trucker Randy. How has Randy Bishop been using his radio show as a megaphone for his wife's side of the story?
AR: Yeah, Trucker Randy's on the air three hours a day every weekday. He bills his show as a conservative Christian talk radio show. He's often touting 2020 presidential election conspiracy theories. And like you said, his wife owns the station. And so this is being broadcast with her involved, as well. Here's, Randy telling his listeners a little bit about what his working relationship is with his wife.
[Audio clip of Randy Bishop speaking on his radio show] "I'm basically her spokesperson, she's at work being the clerk today."
The police investigation seems to be centering on the qualified voter file and whether or not Trucker Randy has had access to it. And like we said before, Victoria Bishop has denied making any changes to the qualified voter files. Her husband has been saying the same thing on his show. This is a clip from back in February.
[Audio clip of Randy Bishop speaking on his radio show] "Victoria Bishop never, never removed any people off of the qualified voter files in any township or village in Antrim County."
And like I said earlier, the Up North Lowdown has identified over a dozen changes she's made. Six of those changes were a change to "cancel." But the interesting thing now is that we have evidence that her husband has been at her computer and could have had access to the qualified voter files. And, you know, we're going into the August primaries, the midterms in November, and it is very difficult to see what this is going to turn into by the time we get to those elections.
Victoria Bishop's husband is a radio host who has been using his show to deny allegations against her.
DT: Well, as you touched on there, you reported that the Michigan State Police is now investigating this possible security breach at Victoria Bishop's office involving her computer. Could you tell us a little bit more about that case?
AR: Yeah. So we don't have much to go on. We have a Michigan State Police report that we were reporting from, and it's heavily redacted. There is a statement by both Victoria and by Randy Bishop saying that they corroborate that he was in her office at that time.
He claims that he was watching the Board of Commissioners meeting, the Antrim County Board of Commissioners meeting, which was occurring in the same building, one floor above where he was. He said that he was waiting for a phone call and that's why he had to be down in her office. [Victoria] also says that Victoria logged into the computer for him, and that he never had access to any of the sensitive files inside of the computer.
So that's their statement based on this police report. But it seems like the investigation is ongoing. And I think we're going to be learning more about what actually happened in her office that day, February 19.
Further reading from Interlochen Public Radio: State police investigating Antrim County Clerk for letting her husband access her computer by Austin Rowlader. Find all of IPR's coverage of this ongoing story here.
Quotes in this article have been lightly edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full interview near the top of this page.
