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Sharon Tyler stepped down as Berrien County clerk last year. After 12 years in the role, she was tired of missing out on family events and time with her grandchildren because of a growing workload.
The death threats didn’t help.
When her grandchildren asked to have a sleepover, “I’d have to say, ‘No, sorry, I’ve got early voting. I’ve got an election,’” she recalled. “I missed out on a lot of it.”
In Michigan, local clerks have a lot of responsibilities. They manage elections, issue marriage certificates, handle requests for public documents, and numerous other duties. And just the election part has grown in recent years. Changes to the state Constitution to expand voting rights — like Prop 3 in 2018 and Prop 2 in 2022 — have increased the amount of work clerks have to put into elections. They now have to stand ready to register voters on Election Day, run at least eight days of early voting, and manage the distribution of absentee ballots to a growing list of voters every election cycle.
The growing demands of the job — combined with the low pay people have come to associate with civic jobs — are discouraging new recruits, limiting the pipeline of talent for a critical role in the democratic process. In 2024, research found, 90% of clerk races in Michigan had only one candidate, and some small communities struggled to find anyone to run.
Along with heavier workloads, Michigan clerks say they face more scrutiny of their work. In Michigan, 83% of election officials reported receiving more complaints than four years ago, compared with only 55% nationally. While Berrien County, in southwest Michigan, has had relatively smooth elections in recent years, Tyler said she still received threats as part of her job.
The pattern is surprising, given that elections in Michigan are run by municipal clerks overseeing smaller jurisdictions, where officials may know their voters more personally, said Paul Gronke, director of the Elections & Voting Information Center, an academic research group, and a professor of political science at Reed College.
“You’re literally talking about harassing or threatening a friend or a neighbor,” Gronke said. “It’s disheartening.”
Michigan clerks struggle to hire workers
It’s little wonder that many of today’s election officials are wary of recommending the job to their own children. A 2024 survey of election administrators by EVIC found that while election officials find their job rewarding, only 22% across the country would encourage their children to follow in their footsteps. In Michigan, the number is slightly higher — about 28% — but still well short of a majority.
Only 66% of election administrators in Michigan reported being proud of their job, compared with more than three-quarters nationally. And the EVIC study found that Michigan officials struggle more than their counterparts around the country to hire full-time workers: 75% in the state reported that it was more difficult, compared with 56% around the U.S.
That matches what Tyler, who is now a Berrien County commissioner, saw during her days as clerk. At one point, she went more than a year without getting even one applicant for an open elections job.
In Michigan, local clerks do much of the initial work of elections — like registering voters, mailing out ballots and setting up polling locations — before votes are handed off to county clerks who are tasked with reporting results and working with canvassers to certify the election. The job is typically an elected position under state law, but it can also be appointed.
In many communities, the job of running elections ends up being part-time because there aren’t enough people in town — or enough funding in the budget — to allow for a full-time position. The Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks warned local governments in late 2023 about the potential threat to elections if clerks aren’t compensated fairly for the amount of work, but wages haven’t increased, leaving election officials to simply do more with less.
Last September, someone in Bay County grew suspicious and made an emergency call after seeing two people working in Beaver Township Hall after hours. It was the township’s clerk and deputy clerk, who were doing required accuracy tests on tabulators.
“Because these are part time positions, the Clerk and her staff are often on site after hours to conduct official business as they also hold other employment outside of the Township,” Bay County Clerk Katie Zanotti explained in a statement posted to the county’s Facebook page.
In Dexter, a city in Washtenaw County, Jenna Kuick is the first full-time city clerk, although she told Votebeat she wasn’t the first person to put in full-time hours in that job. The city appointed her to the role in July after it became clear that the city manager could no longer handle administering elections and running the city.
What happens if no one wants to be clerk?
Sometimes not a single person wants to run for clerk. Canton Township Clerk Michael Siegrist analyzed more than 50 counties across Michigan and found at least 16 communities that had no one on the ballot seeking to be clerk in the November 2024 election.
If no one runs, state law dictates that the community’s council has to appoint someone to fill the role. The appointee serves as clerk until the next election, or until there’s a special election to fill the job. That election is usually run by either the previous clerk or the county, Siegrist said.
Siegrist is second vice president of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks, but undertook the research on his own. He found that in July, nearly 10% of clerk positions up for election across the state had no candidates to fill them. Many of those jobs were ultimately filled by write-in candidates, he said.
Both Siegrist and EVIC found that around 90% of clerks in Michigan ran unopposed in their most recent election, which in many places was 2024.
That could be the result of communities dominated by a single party, Gronke said, but it’s more likely that people simply aren’t lining up to do the job. Elections officials are often older, doing the work as a second or third act to their careers, and there is typically a limited pipeline of talent to replace these community leaders when they are gone.
Michigan is fortunate to have more experienced clerks, broadly — only about a fifth of clerks in the state have less than four years of experience, the EVIC study found, compared with about 31% nationally. But multiple studies have found that turnover across the country is higher than it once was.
Clerks seek greater support from lawmakers
In Berrien, Tyler said she was excited to work with her replacement as clerk, Stacy Loar-Porter. Tyler said she wouldn’t endorse anyone who she felt wouldn’t stay in the role for at least two full terms, wary of seeing such a critical job become just a stepping stone to higher office.
“When the clerk leaves, a lot of the staff leave too, and then, oh, change again,” Tyler said.
Loar-Porter sought out the job because she wanted to make sure the next Berrien County clerk had some experience “in the clerking world.” After 16 years as Lincoln Charter Township clerk, she felt ready to support not only her county but also the other clerks in it. She’s 49 years old, and she told Votebeat she’s ready to do the job for a while yet.
“I think a lot of times, people will look at the amount of work and the amount of change clerks have gone through in the past few years and say it’s not worth it,” she said. “But I love that part. I love elections. I love helping our residents. Having the opportunity to serve our residents is a wonderful opportunity, and it means a lot to me that people trust me enough to do it.”
It helps that clerks tend to be a tight-knit group, she said. She has mentors around the county and state, and she has the opportunity to mentor others as well. She said she’s thankful she gets to keep working with Tyler.
Tyler, a former state legislator, said she hopes to see the state lawmakers do more to support local election officials rather than saddling them with more work. To her, more funding would be nice — she credits grants from the state as the only reason Berrien was able to pull off early voting — but so would smarter election laws.
In the meantime, she said she plans to continue to advocate for the clerk in her new role as county commissioner. She’ll spend time with her grandchildren, maybe take a vacation, and finally take down her Christmas decorations.
Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org