Meet Michigan's Local Election Leaders

Across the state, clerks carry out the vital work of ensuring our elections run smoothly, safely, and securely. They are devoted public servants who work in our counties, townships, and cities, making sure you can vote and that our democracy thrives.

This election year, our hope is to introduce you to some of these hardworking members of our community with brief conversations about what they do and why they are committed to this important work. This edition of Local Election Leaders features Grand Rapids City Clerk Joel Hondorp.

ACLU: Why did you want to become a clerk?

Clerk Joel Hondorp: I have a lifetime passion for elections and public service. My dad worked for the City of Grand Rapids, and I spent 4 summers as a seasonal employee for Grand Rapids. As a student at Michigan State University, I was a candidate for Ingham County Commissioner twice, and then I was successfully elected as Byron Township Trustee in 1996. In 2000, the Byron Township Clerk ran for Kent County Clerk, and I ran for her position and was elected clerk. In 2018, I was appointed as the Grand Rapids City Clerk. While my early career plans were to be elected to higher office, I have thoroughly enjoyed being a municipal clerk.

ACLU: What is the best part of your job? What is the most challenging?

Clerk Joel Hondorp: The best part of my job is when I can assist voters one-on-one. It is especially gratifying when a voter votes for the first time, and I get to witness firsthand that experience.

The challenging aspects are the constant changes to the election process and the confusion it creates for voters, clerk staff, and election workers.

ACLU: Do you have a memorable moment or memory from your time serving as a Clerk?

Clerk Joel Hondorp: The 2020 Presidential Election is the most memorable, especially the Absent Voter Counting Board. With the challenges COVID presented, absentee ballots in Grand Rapids increased from 16,000 ballots in 2016 to 60,000 ballots in 2020. The eyes of the nation were on Kent County the entire election cycle. While it was challenging, it was amazing to see clerk staff, election workers, media, and challengers working together to accomplish the monumental task of processing those ballots and keeping the public up to date on the progress.

ACLU: What do you want voters to know? Anything else that you’d like to share?

Clerk Joel Hondorp: I always say “Know Before You Go!” I share with every voter/group I speak to, go to www.michigan.gov/vote. The website is a powerful tool for voters and would make Election Day a better experience for all involved.

I am thankful to serve along with all my fellow election officials around the state. Voters should know how dedicated municipal clerks and their staff are to make sure every eligible voter can register to vote and cast their ballot safely and securely.

Reproductive rights, including abortion, are in jeopardy in Michigan despite voters overwhelmingly passing a ballot measure in 2022 to amend our state constitution to enshrine these protections. But it is not only our reproductive rights that are under threat. Free speech, LGBTQ+ rights, immigrant rights, public education, and more are in the crosshairs of the powerful and well-funded conservative think tank Project 2025.

Voter Information Hub 

As the executive director of the ACLU of Michigan, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to protecting constitutional rights and civil liberties, I am deeply disturbed by Project 2025 and its vision for America outlined in its playbook, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.

Project 2025 intends to operationalize their 900-plus-page policy plan, published by the Heritage Foundation and backed by more than 100 conservative groups, the first 180 days of the next conservative presidency. If set in motion, it will trample our most fundamental rights and freedoms and undermine our democracy.

In a sense, Project 2025 transcends partisan politics. This is a question of democracy vs. authoritarianism.

It is a roadmap to tyranny.

The forces propelling America in that direction are not going to disappear. It is a movement that must be thwarted whenever and wherever it arises.

The ACLU is no stranger to challenging elected leaders when they violate the rights promised by the U.S. Constitution. We have sued the Obama, Biden, Bush, and Trump administrations, and others before them, to protect the civil rights and liberties of those living in the United States.

The assaults on civil rights and civil liberties under the Trump presidency were unprecedented. Despite the ACLU filing more than 400 legal actions for violating civil rights and liberties, his current campaign promises a Project 2025 turbo-charged second Trump presidency – one that would be disastrous for the most fundamental tenets of democracy.

Although Project 2025 will continue to pursue its policy agenda for years to come, the most pressing threat to the future of our democracy is the November election.

Threatening our rights

If Project 2025 has its way, legal abortion will be abolished in Michigan and nationwide.

“Project 2025 calls for taking a medication used for most abortions off the shelves, allowing states to prevent hospitals from providing abortions to patients in life-threatening emergencies, and even using a law from the 1800s to prosecute abortion providers nationwide,” according to Brigitte Amiri, ACLU Deputy Director of the Reproductive Freedom Project.

The national abortion-rights group, Reproductive Freedom for All describes Project 2025’s plan this way: “The extensive mandate calls to gut reproductive freedom … attacking contraception, deploying fetal personhood, and undermining IVF in federal policy. From deleting the word ‘abortion’ from every ‘federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

The same dangerous mindset can also be found in Project 2025’s open hostility toward LGBTQ+ people and their rights. It aims to gut protections for the LGBTQ+ community and would eliminate any federal policies that promote LGBTQ+ equality.

As if that weren’t bad enough, Project 2025 goes even further, calling for an America where, in the eyes of the federal government, LGBTQ+ people don’t exist at all and efforts to promote diversity are completely erased. Project 2025’s playbook details how it would achieve that goal:

“This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

“Transgender people could be criminalized for their very existence,” warns Jay Kaplan, Nancy Katz & Margo Dichtelmiller LGBTQ+ Rights Project Staff Attorney.

Threat to voting rights

Project 2025 also poses a significant threat to the foundation of our democracy by undermining voting rights. Their plan would shift responsibility for prosecuting election-related offenses from the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to the Criminal Division. According to The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (LCCHR), “This will open the door to sham investigations and aggressive prosecutions of voters and election officials” which would serve “to intimidate state and local election workers already under threat and could criminalize election administration disputes.”

Our elections would also be undermined by Project 2025’s plan to end the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) efforts to combat online disinformation and threats to secure elections, as well as requiring state and local recipients of DHS grant funding to commit to sharing voter registration databases. “This would interfere with state maintenance of voter lists in order to cast doubt on the legitimacy of election results and allow the administration to collect voter rolls in order to deploy aggressive voter purges that disenfranchise voters,” according to the LCCHR.

Immigrant rights under attack

Also of great concern is its “extreme anti-immigrant approach to the border,” says Maribel Hernandez Rivera, ACLU Director of Policy and Government Affairs, Border, and Immigration. Project 2025’s playbook states that it will prioritize border security and immigration enforcement, including detention and deportation.

Couple that with a central promise of Trump’s 2024 campaign to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” once in office. If re-elected, Trump plans to quickly expand deportation operations on “day one,” deporting millions of people a year and detaining untold numbers of people in massive camps pending deportation.

Protecting democracy together

While former President Donald Trump claims to disavow even knowing anything about 2025 – despite that many of the former president’s closest policy advisers are heavily involved in the project – his campaign platform Agenda 47 mirrors parts of Project 2025’s plans.

ACLU legal, legislative, and policy experts examined the records of both presidential nominees and their visions for the country. Our analysis detailed in 13 memos lays out both challenges and opportunities each candidate poses regarding the ACLU’s priority issues, including abortion access, LGBTQ+ rights, First Amendment freedoms, racial equity, immigrant rights, criminal legal reform, and more. Our memos also map out how we will advance any executive action to protect civil rights and liberties and fight any executive action that threatens them.

I am confident we can defeat Project 2025. While they have a 900-plus page plan to undermine democracy, we have a more than 100-year record of fighting to protect it.

But we don’t do this work alone. Along with our national ACLU office and 53 sister affiliates across the country, we have millions of supporters, volunteers, donors, cooperating attorneys, and coalition partners who are with us.

In 2022, thousands of people across our state and beyond volunteered, donated money, knocked on doors, and voted overwhelmingly to protect reproductive rights in Michigan. We can succeed again by bringing that same fierce energy and commitment to protecting all our rights by making our voices heard.

Defeat Project 2025. Vote 2024.