EMS, Adjudication Workstations, and RTM Laptops Excluded from L&A Testing – 172,000+ Absentee Votes Affected (MI)

The City of Detroit deployed central Election Management System (EMS) workstations, Remote Tally Management (RTM) laptops, and adjudication workstations at the TCF Center to process over 172,000 absentee ballots. None of these centralized, high-risk systems were subjected to public accuracy testing before the election. MCL § 168.798 requires public testing of voting equipment; the EMS and adjudication systems are the highest-impact nodes in the vote-tabulation chain – they receive tabulator output, manage batch adjudication decisions, and produce final consolidated totals. Testing only precinct-level tabulators while leaving EMS and adjudication systems entirely untested creates a fundamental gap in the verification chain: accurate precinct tabulation can be completely negated by downstream manipulation at the EMS or adjudication layer.