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LANSING, Mich. (WLNS) — In the weeks before the Aug. 4 election, Cassidy Taylor would finish her 9-to-5 workday as Litchfield’s city clerk, head to the Fayette Township office seven minutes away, and stuff absentee ballot envelopes from about 6 to 9 p.m.
Fayette Township, a small rural town with about 800 registered voters in Hillsdale County, has not had a clerk since January. No one ran for clerk in August, and no one has been appointed since. The township is paying for a special election in May to try again.
Until then, Taylor is running Fayette’s elections on top of Litchfield’s, including both Nov. 3 general elections.
“They want someone there to help them all day long, and I just couldn’t for both of them,” Taylor said.
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Michigan is one of eight states that run elections at the local level. In most states, county clerks run elections. In addition to administering elections, Michigan city and township clerks maintain the voter rolls, run precincts and polling places, hire and train poll workers and handle absentee ballots.
Hillsdale County Clerk Abe Dane said a clerk’s demands have increased over the last decade — but the pay hasn’t. Michigan expanded voting access in 2018 and 2022, adding no-reason absentee voting and mandated early voting. Multiple reports found that attacks on clerks have risen in recent years.
Sharon Tyler, a former state representative who resigned from her post as Berrien County clerk in 2024, told the nonprofit newsroom Votebeat last year that lawmakers should do more to support clerks across the state.
Fifty-three percent of Michigan’s local governments in 2022 reported harassment, threats or violence against someone in their government, including abuse against clerks, election staff or election workers in 29% of jurisdictions, according to a 2022 University of Michigan Public Policy Survey.
Taylor works full-time as the Litchfield clerk. The Fayette Township clerk job is part-time and pays $12,000 a year. Some clerks, Dane said, make $8,000 a year working part-time.
A clerk also often handles public records requests and helps process them, even if they aren’t the designated coordinator.
This is especially important in Fayette Township, where residents are grappling with a 1.5-megawatt solar farm proposal. The township Planning Commission rejected the proposal, which would have put solar panels on 1,350 acres of farmland.
Uproar has overwhelmed the clerk’s office with requests for information about the project, Dane said.
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“If people are upset about a solar installation — solar farm or whatever you want to call it — they’re going to be calling the township clerk a lot,” Dane said. “They’re going to be requesting records, they’re going to be showing up to meetings, which is all great, but that’s just an extraordinary burden on the clerk.”
The project’s developer, Chicago-based Ranger Power, asked a judge to reverse the commission’s ruling. State law allows a company to sue to override local opposition, just like OpenAI and Oracle did in 2025 when seeking approval for an artificial intelligence data center in Saline Township, south of Ann Arbor.
Local leaders say it’s getting harder to find candidates for office, especially in small, rural jurisdictions. Another U-M statewide Public Policy Survey conducted in spring 2025 and released in spring 2026 found that 75% of county, city, township and village officials agreed that not enough residents are willing to serve on appointed boards or committees.
Genesee County Clerk Domonique Clemons said his area has had a tumultuous year for clerks. He said one community in the county went through four appointed clerks. In another, a deadlocked board left no one in charge, and the state had to step in before the August election.
“One of the most common reasons that we’re seeing (clerks resign) is because people are not interested in this position,” Clemons said. “They’re recognizing the burnout that the clerks are seeing. They’re seeing the political rhetoric that is being slammed back and forth, the threats that are happening. It has been a challenge to recruit individuals to be local clerks and to run and administer our elections.”
An election worker checks on signed signatures on mail-in ballots at the new Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center in the City of Industry, Calif. on Thursday, Feb. 29, 2024. The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/Clerk’s Office unveiled a massive new ballot processing center that will allow it to count ballots from the county’s 5.69 million registered voters in a single secure location. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)
Why Fayette Township’s clerk resigned
Jessica Bradley served as Fayette Township clerk for two years until January 2026, in addition to her full-time job with the state of Michigan. Bradley said she would arrive at work for her regular job at 7:30 a.m. and leave at 4 p.m. Then she’d work the rest of the day as township clerk, where she’d administer the election and perform several, if not a dozen or more, other tasks.
Once the solar project took off, Bradley said, the job became more demanding than she could handle. She said that her family had even helped her stuff envelopes — a job performed regularly by community volunteers — to help meet mail-in ballot deadlines.
“I was already giving a lot,” Bradley said. “It definitely pushed me over the edge.”
Township clerks in Michigan are elected, not appointed like most city clerks.
Fayette Township held a special election in August to replace Bradley, with a filing deadline of June 24. But zero candidates filed to run. The township had 45 days after the June deadline to appoint a new clerk, but nobody stepped up.
“There was no one to appoint,” Dane said.
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The cycle will repeat in 2027, with a special election in May, which Dane said isn’t ideal because Fayette Township has to foot the bill. In August and November even-year elections, local races are carried on the same ballot as state and federal races. During those elections, the costs associated with a local race are minimal. But in May of an odd year, there is no statewide race. Fayette Township voters will cast ballots for a single seat, and the township is paying for the entire election.
For now, Taylor is continuing to help Fayette Township run its Nov. 3 election, and she said the August primary went smoothly.
“The inspectors in our area who work the Election Day polls are so experienced,” she said. “They are all dedicated, just as dedicated as we clerks are to having a free and fair and safe election.”
Taylor said she took the job in Litchfield because she saw an opening for an administrative assistant without realizing the job was created as a succession plan for the clerk.
“When they explained it to me, it really piqued my interest, and I thought, ‘Well, yeah, why not try that?’ It seemed interesting enough,” Taylor said.
Taylor works full-time, and she notes she’s “lucky” because many clerks are expected to work part-time — often for $10,000 or less — and meet deadlines to send out absentee ballots and make sure elections run smoothly.
“Election administration is such essential work,” Taylor said. “It’s our constitutionally given right to vote for it to be something that’s just kind of cast aside and not cared about as much.”
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FILE – The state Capitol building is seen on Dec. 12, 2012, in Lansing, Mich. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)
State lawmakers could alleviate this right now
With just over a month until the election, state lawmakers have tried to address the burden on clerks and the stand-ins who manage elections when the clerks can’t.
If a clerk and the deputy clerks can’t administer the election, state law requires the township board to appoint someone who is qualified until the clerk returns — or, in Fayette Township’s case, once a new clerk is elected. That person must be a registered voter in the township.
Republican state Rep. Jennifer Wortz of Quincy, whose district includes the Hillsdale County township, authored House Bill 5717. The legislation would allow the township board to contract with any accredited Michigan resident to run its elections. The law wouldn’t require them to live in the township.
The bill passed the Republican-led state House in May by a vote of 104-to-2. Nearly every person in the chamber voted in favor of it. But the bill has stalled in the Democratic-led state Senate, where it has been in committee since June.
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The chair of the Elections and Ethics Committee, state Sen. Jeremy Moss, D-Southfield, did not respond to a request for com
