‘Is it going to be safe?’: suspicions and fear dominate a crucial swing county in lead-up to US election

Vanessa Guerra is resigned to questions from Donald Trump’s supporters about the myriad ways in which American voters imagine next month’s presidential election might be rigged against him.

But more recently the Saginaw county clerk, who is overseeing the ballot in a highly contested patch of central Michigan, has faced a new line of questioning at meetings called to reassure distrustful voters.

“I did a presentation last week and, as usual, we had a lot of questions about the validity of election results. But now they’re also asking: Is it going to be safe to go to the polls on election day? Is something going to happen? That’s something new,” said Guerra.

The most consequential US presidential election of recent times is also likely to be the most disputed, particularly if the results are as close as opinion polls suggest.

Republican officials are gearing up to stall and overturn the count if it goes against Trump. Meanwhile, the former US president has warned of a bloodbath if he loses again next month, which voters have reason to take seriously in the wake of the January 6 storming of the US Capitol after he lost the last election.

Trump’s continued insistence that the 2020 vote was rigged against him – including at a rally in Saginaw earlier this month – and that Democrats are plotting to steal next month’s election, has left its mark.

Democratic politician and Saginaw county clerk Vanessa Guerra in her office in October. Photograph: Rick Findler/The Guardian

In Michigan, a key swing state that Trump won by fewer than 11,000 votes in 2016 and then lost to Joe Biden four years later, one in five people say they do not have confidence that votes will be counted accurately.

Across the US, just 8% of Trump supporters say they have a great deal of confidence there will be a fair election and only 16% are very confident that their own vote will be counted accurately, according to YouGov. Kamala Harris’s supporters are much more trusting, with 72% having a great deal of confidence in the conduct of the election, although that still leaves large numbers of Democrats also questioning the process.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, a majority of both Harris and Trump supporters expect mass protests against the result if their candidate wins. Michigan has ramped up security at election centres across the state after Trump voters attempted to storm a counting centre in Detroit in 2020 as the election swung away from him.

Guerra, like county clerks in other jurisdictions, has sought to counter Trump’s claims by holding public sessions to explain the election counting process. She has also encouraged sceptics to become election inspectors, or poll workers, so they can reassure themselves and others that the process is fair.

But concerns about safety are harder to address. Guerra, who was elected to be county clerk as a Democrat but makes clear the nonpartisan requirements of her office, picks her words carefully.

“It worries me that he makes voters less at ease. So when I started hearing the concerns about ‘Can I go to the polls on election day?’, that’s when I realised that people were feeling alarmed,” she said.

“We’re always concerned about security here, whether or not Donald Trump existed. Elections, they need to be secure, and we need to be transparent about what we do, regardless of who’s running for office. But the rhetoric that voters are hearing and digesting and then asking me about their safety, I’m seeing that more now, and that does concern me.”

Donald Trump speaks to supporters at Saginaw Valley State University in October in Saginaw, Michigan. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, said her office receives threats “every day” over the election. She has twice been the target of swatting recently, in which false emergency calls sent armed police to her home.

“Swatting is a form of political violence that is horrific, dangerous and intended to terrify its victims. But hear me clearly: I will not be intimidated,” she said at the time.

In 2020, dozens of protesters, some armed, descended on Benson’s house to demand she overturn the election count in Michigan.

Guerra said she has not been threatened as county clerk but she was the target of repeated intimidation when she was a member of the Michigan legislature in 2020, including when armed Trump supporters stormed the state capitol building over the coronavirus lockdown in what was widely seen as a dress rehearsal for January 6 in Washington.

Guerra said that the rising atmosphere of intimidation has led to a marked increase in people requesting an absentee vote, some out of fear.

“I have seen a lot more people asking me: Should I early vote or should I absentee? Is something going to happen on election day?” she said.

Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, left, is sworn in during a Senate judiciary committee hearing in Washington DC on 3 August 2022. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

More than one-quarter of Saginaw county’s registered voters have already requested an absentee ballot. But postal voting is itself a focus of conspiracy theories after Trump repeatedly alleged it was used to rig the count four years ago because absentee ballots in Michigan and other states were counted only after in-person votes, causing delays in final results that shifted Biden’s way.

Michigan has changed its election laws since 2020 in response to the allegations of rigging and threats, including to allow absentee ballots to be counted before election day.

The former president has shifted away from opposition to postal voting more recently after he realised that discouraging his supporters from casting absentee ballots might mean they don’t vote at all. But in Saginaw, Republican officials continue to push doubts.

Debra Ell, who led a takeover of Saginaw’s Republican party by Trump supporters, stands by a claim that fraudulent postal votes were used to steal the last election for Biden.

“I was on the ground. We walked out of our office in 2020 at about 10 o’clock at night and [Trump] was 75% ahead in Saginaw county, and we were just on a cloud. There’s no way that that could change. I think they cheated,” she said.

Ell does not blame local officials but said she has no more confidence in the electoral process this year.

Democratic volunteers in Michigan gather in October. Photograph: Rick Findler

“Between the drop boxes and the mail-in voting, the system is corrupted. A lot of this is absentee voting. You can vote absentee for any reason, and there were a lot of people that got absentee ballots for dead people or people who don’t live here any more, stuff like that. They refuse to clean up their voter rolls,” she said.

Andrea Paschall, a Republican who founded Latinos for Trump of Saginaw county, said she has no doubt the last election was rigged although she is uncertain if there was tampering in Saginaw.

“I haven’t found proof for Saginaw county in particular, but I have seen proof that the election was stolen and read the documentations, and I’ve talked to the people who’ve conducted those studies,” she said.

Paschall said she is not confident this year’s election will be clean.

“I have very little faith. There are too many ways to cheat the system. We are trying to find those ways but the problem is, if everybody doesn’t agree that there’s a problem, then you can’t solve the problem,” she said.

Guerra said there is no evidence for these or other claims that the casting and counting of ballots was manipulated. She said her office has met with local Republican officials, including Ell, to reassure sceptics that nothing untoward is going on in Saginaw county, where she works with 30 local clerks administering the election on the ground, many of them also Republicans.

But Guerra recognised that there is only so much she can do and that probably the only way the election is going to remain undisputed is if there is a clear winner.

“I would prefer a large margin between the two major candidates,” she said.