An election observer monitors two poll workers processing absentee ballots in the Milwaukee Election Commission warehouse on Aug. 13. Discrepancies in the count could be used by county canvassing boards in swing states as a reason not to certify elections. (Photo by Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline)

GRAYLING, Mich. — Clairene Jorella was furious.

In the northern stretches of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, the Crawford County Board of Canvassers had just opened its meeting to certify the August primary when Jorella, 83 years old and one of two Democrats on the panel, laid into her Republican counterparts.

Glaring, she said she was gobsmacked by the partisan opinions they’d recently aired publicly.

“We are an impartial board,” she told them a day after the primary election, sitting at a conference room table in the back of the county clerk’s office. “We are expected to be impartial. We are not expected to bring our political beliefs into this board.”

The two Republicans, Brett Krouse and Bryce Metcalfe, had two weeks earlier written a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, endorsing a candidate for township clerk because of “her commitment to election integrity.”

Citing their positions on the Board of Canvassers, the letter went on to claim that because of new state election laws, including one that allows for early voting, “All of the ingredients required for voter fraud were present.”

Jorella thought the letter was inappropriate. And she had reason to worry, having seen in recent years Republican members of county boards in Michigan and in other states refuse to certify elections when their preferred candidate lost. It was a preview of the battles communities nationwide might face in November’s presidential election.

Metcalfe, 48, said he didn’t do anything wrong.

“I don’t serve the Democrat Party in any way, shape or form,” he said. “I serve the Republican Party.”

“Bryce, you serve the people,” said Brian Chace, 77, the board’s other Democratic member.

Metcalfe raised his voice. “I will not be silenced.”

The board members argued for 20 minutes, then broke into two bipartisan teams to begin their task at hand. In a process known as canvassing, they looked through documents precinct by precinct, making sure that the total votes shown on a polling place’s ballot tabulator matched the number of ballots issued.

While members of the board eventually certified the election after meeting a few times over the following week, the kerfuffle illustrates the tension consuming communities around the country over one of the crucial final steps in elections.

Stateline crisscrossed Michigan and Wisconsin — two states critical in the race for the presidency — to interview dozens of voters, local election officials and activists to understand how the voting, tabulation and certification processes could be disrupted in November.

There is broad concern that, despite checks and balances built into the voting system, Republican members of state and county boards tasked with certifying elections will be driven by conspiracy theories and refuse to fulfill their roles if former President Donald Trump loses again.

Last month, the Georgia State Election Board passed new rules that would allow county canvassing boards to conduct their own investigations before certifying election results. State and national Democrats have sued the state board over the rules.

The fear that these efforts could sow chaos and delay results is not unfounded: Over the past four years, county officials in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania have refused to certify certain elections. After immense pressure, county officials either changed their minds, or courts or state officials had to step in.

“People are now trying to interfere with this otherwise pretty boring process, based on the false idea that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and that widespread voter fraud continues to pervade our election system,” said Lauren Miller Karalunas, a counsel for the Brennan Center, a voting rights group housed at the New York University School of Law.

“This is a mandatory process with no room for these certifying officials to go behind the results to investigate anything,” she added.

‘We’re working for the people’

Michael Siegrist, the Democratic clerk for Canton Township, Michigan, has zero patience for election deniers.

On the Saturday before the August primary, he stood before 11 soon-to-be poll workers at a training session, repeatedly emphasizing one point: Run a good, clean, legal election.

“All of the rules we have in place are either to protect the integrity of the election or to protect the voters,” Siegrist said. The trainees nodded along.

Down the hall, two dozen election inspectors and township officials opened and processed absentee ballots.

“We’re working for the people,” Siegrist continued. “We’re not working for ourselves. We’re not working for our philosophies. And we’re not working for our political parties.”

Siegrist, who serves a suburban Detroit community of nearly 99,000 people within Wayne County, has seen it before.

Two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers initially refused to certify more than 800,000 votes cast during the 2020 presidential election; Siegrist was one of many people who joined a Zoom call the county board set up for public comments two weeks after the election and berated them.

“We are basically doing what no foreign country has ever been able to do, which is successfully undermine our election system,” he told them.

Years later, the Detroit News uncovered audio of Trump pressuring those GOP members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers not to certify the 2020 election, promising them legal representation. Siegrist is still concerned about the certification process and worries that board members will be compromised by partisanship and refuse to certify the election in November.

In 2021, Robert Boyd, at the time the newest Republican on the Wayne County Board of Canvassers and one of the people who will be tasked with certifying November’s election, told the Detroit Free Press that if he were in his position in 2020 he would not have certified the election.

Certifying elections had been a mostly routine formality for more than a century across the country. The results that come out after the polls close on election night are unofficial and need to be certified. While laws vary slightly by state, bipartisan, citizen-led panels are typically tasked with certifying elections at both the county and state levels.

Usually known as boards of canvassers, the panel’s job is to compare the number of ballots cast according to poll books with the number of ballots fed through a tabulator. Sometimes, those numbers don’t match.

Those mismatches are to be expected and are almost always handled swiftly. But in 2020, they formed one of the bases for the lie — spread widely by Trump and his supporters — that the election was stolen in favor of Democrat Joe Biden.

If the numbers are off in a precinct — usually by one or two votes — a poll worker might provide an explanation to the canvassing board. A voter may have been impatient with a long line and left the precinct with a ballot in hand, for example, or two ballots may have been stuck together. Sometimes, board members ask poll workers or municipal clerks to come in and explain a discrepancy.

It’s a tedious process akin to watching paint dry, said Christina Schlitt, president of the League of Women Voters of Grand Traverse Area, which sends volunteers throughout Michigan to make sure canvassing board members follow the rules.

“They’re not to look for any nefarious actions, although some inexperienced canvassers, particularly in one party, seem to look for problems,” she said, referring to the GOP.

The proper way to contest the election results is not through the certification process, she said. Aggrieved candidates can always call for a recount or go to the courts.

Local officials prepare

Barb Byrum, the Democratic clerk for Ingham County, Michigan, recently had to use some of her political capital to keep an election denier off the certifying panel for the county of nearly 285,000 people.

Republican members of the county’s Board of Commissioners listened to and agreed with Byrum, an outspoken former state representative who is not afraid to negotiate.

“I needed someone else,” she said, praising cooperative local leaders. “Many other county clerks did not have that luxury, so they do have conspiracy pushers and believers on their board of canvassers.”

Byrum, whose county includes the state capital of Lansing, works from the county courthouse in Mason, a rural city of about 8,200 people. “Hometown, U.S.A.” signs line its streets. Downtown, LGBTQ+ flags hang from the windows of Byrum’s first-floor office, where passersby can see them through the beech trees.

After Trump lost Michigan in 2020, his supporters sued to have Ingham County’s and two other counties’ 1.2 million votes excluded from the state’s 5.5 million vote count, saying there had been “issues and irregularities.” At the time, Byrum called the lawsuit “ludicrous” and full of conspiracy theories. Biden won the state by 154,000 votes.

The desire to keep election troublemakers off county canvassing boards is bipartisan.

Justin Roebuck, the clerk for Ottawa County, Michigan, and a Republican, said he has been dispelling election lies about alleged widespread fraud in elections since 2016. So, he feels more prepared than ever to deal with potential disruptions this fall.

“It’s not something that I worry about; it’s something that I prepare for,” said Roebuck, who serves a county of about 301,000 people who live near Lake Michigan’s coastline.

“We’re asking our community to trust us,” he added. “I want to trust them too. I want to be able to dialogue with people, even in heated situations.”

During the 2022 midterm elections, a group of around 15 voters went to the Board of Canvassers meeting and said there must be fraud because the Republican gubernatorial candidate had received fewer voters than the county commissioner in a precinct. They accosted Roebuck in the hallway, he recalled.

Instead of getting security involved, he invited them into a nearby conference room.

“We have to be transparent and talk through the challenges,” he said.

A preview of November

One of the leading voices questioning the integrity of Wisconsin’s elections is named Jefferson Davis.

On the morning of Wisconsin’s Aug. 13 primary, Davis quarterbacked the Republican observers at the Milwaukee Election Commission’s warehouse south of downtown. The only person wearing a suit in a sea of casually dressed election workers, Davis weaved throughout the crowded facility with familiarity.

“I don’t care if you beat me in an election, as long as you don’t cheat or steal or compromise or whatever,” he told Stateline, before outlining eight ways he claimed voter fraud is occuring in Wisconsin, including inflated voter lists, noncitizens voting and harvesting ballots from people in long-term care facilities.

Davis, the spokesperson for a group called the Ad-hoc Committee for the Wisconsin Full Forensic Physical and Cyber Audit, placed his people in front of the yellow caution tape that sectioned off election workers who were processing 23,000 absentee ballots. There were 15 Republican observers and two Democrats and a handful of unaffiliated observers.

Bipartisan pairs of Democratic, Republican or unaffiliated poll workers sorted and counted absentee ballots, checking to see whether the voter had provided their required signature and address on the envelope. The workers wore paper wristbands colored blue, red or purple to mark their party affiliation. Facing hours of work, some brought pillows for their chairs.

Davis’ observers had clipboards and forms, developed by the Republican National Committee, noting the number of security cameras, tables, election workers by political affiliation, building access points and tabulating machines. They also noted when and why each ballot was rejected.

“We care about our Constitution, we care about our freedom, our liberty, our independence, because we cannot have an election stolen again,” Davis said, raising his voice over the whirr of four high-speed letter openers.

Before the ballot-counting process began, Brenda Wood, a member of the Board of Absentee Canvassers in Milwaukee, walked observers through the rules: They had to stay three feet away from election workers and could only ask them a voter’s name and address and why an absentee ballot was rejected.

“If they provide only ‘Milwaukee, Wisconsin,’ and not their street address, then it will be rejected,” Wood said.

“Oh good,” Davis quickly responded.

After her spiel, Davis rapidly but politely peppered her with more than 20 questions that he called “quickies,” grilling her on the day’s process. He wanted to make sure there wasn’t any “hanky-panky” going on. Other observers asked one or two questions.

Throughout the day, election workers processed ballots without significant issues. Occasionally, one would raise a cardboard paddle to ask staff a question about procedure or whether they should reject a ballot. At one point, an election worker, overwhelmed by observers asking her questions, put her forehead on the table and asked them to give her space.

“Can we put a note saying the observer wanted this ballot rejected?” asked one GOP observer, wanting to have her concern in writing on the ward’s official documents.

“You can, but we’re not going to reject it,” a commission staffer said. “It’s the rules. It’s how we’ve been doing it.”

Fourteen hours later, around 9 p.m. and after all the absentee ballots had been counted, Bonnie Chang, another member of the Board of Absentee Canvassers, went around with blank flash drives and downloaded the vote totals from the nine ballot tabulators in the warehouse.

A gaggle of observers followed her every step, while the chairman of the Republican Party of Milwaukee County, a member of the Wisconsin Election Commission who was one of Trump’s fake electors in 2020 and a host of others looked on.

As two county election workers who had been paired that day were leaving the warehouse, one leaned over to the other.

“It’ll be busy in November,” she said.

“We’ll make it through,” he said.

“We always do,” she responded.

This story is republished from Stateline, a sister publication to the Kentucky Lantern and part of the nonprofit States Newsroom network.