The County Clerk on Macomb's Ballot Is Running the State's Elections Next — If Voters Say So

Buried partway down Michigan's long ballot tomorrow is a race Macomb County voters can read as local news: the contest for Secretary of State, the office that administers Michigan's elections, driver's licenses and vehicle services. The Republican nominee is Anthony Forlini — Macomb County's own Clerk and Register of Deeds. The Democratic nominee is Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II. The seat is open, and whoever wins it will run the 2028 elections in a perennial battleground state.

That makes the county clerk's office in Mount Clemens an interesting place this week. The Clerk's operation is the working machinery of Macomb democracy: it supports the county's election administration alongside city and township clerks, keeps court and land records, and processes the paperwork of civic life from deeds to business filings. Running it is, among other things, an audition for the job Forlini is seeking in Lansing.

The secretary of state race rarely leads a newscast, but its consequences are concrete. The office sets how elections are administered across Michigan's 83 counties — the training, the technology standards, the voter-file maintenance — and it is the counter where every Michigan driver eventually stands. In a state decided by thin margins, the competence and credibility of that office is not an abstraction.

Macomb voters should also note the home-field detail: because the county clerk is on the statewide ballot, the county's own election machinery tomorrow rests, as it always does, with the city and township clerks — in Warren, the City Clerk's office at City Hall — and the poll workers staffing each precinct from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Win or lose, tomorrow's result will say something about Macomb County's place in Michigan politics: a county big enough to send one of its own to run the state's elections is a county neither party can afford to take for granted.