Waterford Township Clerk Kim Markee says the reason fewer people are interested in jobs like hers is the stress.
She’s been feeling more of that recently after the New York Times reported that allies of former President Donald Trump Republican were mobilizing nationwide to purge voters from official rolls using new data tools and disputed legal theories.
Waterford Township was featured as an example of how Trump is quietly challenging thousands of voters in battleground states in hopes of affecting the outcome of November’s election.
Markee said she cut more than 1,000 voters from the township’s list after Martin MacDonald, a 79-year-old resident who believes the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, submitted three challenges since August listing more than 1,352 of Waterford’s 60,000 registered voters.
The Times reported that the Waterford purge and others went unnoticed by state election officials until uncovered by its reporters.
The Michigan Secretary of State’s office has since told clerks to reinstate the voters, saying the removals did not follow state and federal law.
What Markee wants people to know is that she followed the advice of the township’s attorney.
“It wasn’t like we willy nilly removed them just because someone requested that,” she said. “We did a lot of research on these people … We never just remove a voter from the rolls based on someone else’s request.”
Waterford’s situation is one example of how much more is required of local officials overseeing elections and what other municipalities nationwide face this divisive election year.
State law requires an affidavit for each challenge of an individual voter’s registration and that an affidavit cannot be submitted with a list of voter names. An affidavit is a written statement by a person swearing to the accuracy of a fact or document and can be used in court. An affidavit is notarized and is legally binding.
Because MacDonald included one affidavit with each list of multiple voters he challenged, the state required Markee to restore the names to the voter rolls.
But before the state’s ruling, validating MacDonald’s lists and reaching out to those voters cost the township an estimated $10,000 in staff time and certified mailings, Markee said.
MacDonald, a retired engineer, said he’s one of dozens of people – they call themselves activists – in Michigan challenging voter rolls. He volunteered for the work with Michigan Fair Elections because he believes Trump won the last election.
When the former president visited Waterford last month, MacDonald was there, standing in the bitter cold for so long he suffered frostbite on his fingertips.
MacDonald gets address lists from a website called, Check My Vote, which operates in Michigan, Ohio and New Mexico.
He initially challenged 27 voter registrations on Aug. 18, after visiting the addresses including the Regency of Waterford, an assisted living facility.
“I went with a list of all those people and asked the girl behind the desk if they still lived there. She told me who (on the list) had died,” he said.
He tracked some voters’ names to four area hotels and went to each hotel.
“All but one of them said, ‘None of these people live here,’ ” he said.
MacDonald paid $15 at a UPS store to have a single affidavit notarized.
Markee checked with the township attorney and sent a message to the secretary of state’s office about how to proceed. The attorney told her to research every name on the list. She said she didn’t hear back from the state until January.
On Oct. 16, MacDonald delivered another affidavit to Markee challenging 1,095 voter registrations of people he claimed had moved out of state. He used a change of address list and the state’s qualified voter list. He didn’t knock on as many doors to verify that people had moved, he said. Instead, he compared the names on his list to the township’s tax rolls, which would not count people renting a home. By then, he’d learned he could get his affidavit notarized for free at his bank.
Markee, who is also a Republican, told him well over 900 of the names on his list were already on the township’s list of inactive voters and that checking his work would be costly.
“I said, ‘Do you realize someone’s sidewalk might not get fixed because of this?’ ” Markee said.
She hired at least six people to check the 1,095 names in MacDonald’s second challenge of the voting records. The temporary workers also scoured obituary notices, death records and genealogy websites, such as ancestry.com, and Geographic Information System data to see if anyone on MacDonald’s list had died.
The law allows the clerk to send a notice, usually a postcard, to an inactive voter.
A voter’s registration can be challenged by another registered voter in the same municipality, which is what MacDonald did. When that happens, the law requires the clerk to send a certified mailing to the voter in question.
The letters or postcards say that if voters don’t respond in 30 days or vote in the next two federal elections, their registration will be canceled. Waterford spent over $4,000 – between $4.98 each and $8.53 each – to mail hundreds of certified letters based upon MacDonald’s challenges.
Markee said the costs so far were paid by money the township had budgeted to cover the changes in the law that took effect last year. The township won’t have that money this year.
At least one valid registered voter on MacDonald’s lists, an active-duty U.S. Air Force officer, was cut from the rolls but later reinstated.
