COVID Rules Weaponized to Block Observers from L&A Testing; Demonstration Units Substituted for Production Tabulators (WI)

Wisconsin municipalities leveraged COVID-19 spacing restrictions to unlawfully restrict poll challengers and citizen observers from meaningfully overseeing L&A testing. Wis. Stat. § 5.84 guarantees any elector the right to observe pre-election testing of automatic voting equipment. The use of public health rules to enforce the practical equivalent of exclusion from these tests violated this statutory guarantee. Compounding this, testing was in multiple documented instances limited to a single demonstration tabulator rather than comprehensive testing of all electronic tabulators scheduled for deployment – identical to the Maricopa County pattern of testing spare or representative units instead of actual production machines. In Green Bay specifically, CTCL operative Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein had been granted operational access to the central tabulation facility – access that no private citizen should have held – raising the question of whether L&A testing at that facility was supervised by an authorized governmental official or by a partisan private operative.