Ottawa County, Michigan — Late summer on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan is a slice of serenity, unless you’re discussing elections. Then, forget the smooth sailing.
“We have been in this environment where there has just been much distrust sewn into the system,” Ottawa County Clerk Justin Roebuck told CBS News.
Roebuck, a Republican who runs the county’s elections, is no stranger to this skepticism. He said he talks to residents “who do still have really serious concerns” that the 2020 election was stolen.
That distrust was on display during the Michigan primaries earlier this month.
“It’s hard to trust sometimes. It’s hard to trust,” one skeptical voter told CBS News.
But Roebuck is trying to convince these people that the data doesn’t lie.
“We conduct post-election audits where we have a 100% accuracy rate on the equipment itself,” Roebuck said, adding that “it’s a 100% accuracy rate. It’s not even 99. And we would tell you if it was 99.”
The distrust helped push Teresa DeGraaf, former clerk for Ottawa County’s Port Sheldon Township, to retire.
“It’s really hard to do a job where you know you are doing everything right and be attacked,” DeGraaf told CBS News. “… And I just want to say that everyone that works (in elections), those are your friends, your family, your neighbors. And do you really believe that all those folks would try to cheat you when you vote?”
While voters overall say they’re confident in their state’s election process, it depends on who you ask. According to a CBS News poll conducted in late July and early August, 26% of Republican respondents said they were “very confident” in the their state’s voting system. That’s just under half of Democratic respondents, 56% of whom said they are very confident.
The poll also found that 32% of Republicans were “not confident” in their state’s voting system, as opposed to only 8% of Democrats.
So far this year, former President Donald Trump has publicly said the election system is rigged more than 140 times, despite dozens of audits and lawsuits that found no fraud in 2020.
“If we cannot trust the way that we choose our government, we are in a bad situation as a country,” Roebuck said.
That’s why Roebuck is working on restoring that trust. He’s conducted demonstrations for residents about how voting machines work. He has also confronted local officials who have alleged fraud.
And with the presidential election less than three months away, clerks like Roebuck are rebuilding that trust one conversation at a time.
“We live in this community too,” Roebuck said. “We shop here, kids go to school here, we go to church together, and we need to be able to build those bridges.”
