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Trisha Nesbitt, 31, is the Van Buren County Treasurer in southwest Michigan and has volunteered as an observer in past elections. When she heard the local GOP needed volunteers in Detroit, she drove to the city after work, went to the Republican meeting room at the convention center, and got her credentials as a poll challenger. That’s when things started to get shady.

“The election workers were not letting anyone in at the time,” Nesbitt told The Federalist on Friday. The workers told her and the other GOP volunteers that “the election hall was full.” So they waited. Eventually, they managed to get in by tagging along with a large group of union members who were being admitted to the hall where ballots were being counted—despite previous claims the hall had been “full.” Nesbitt and the others signed in, giving their names and Republican Party affiliation, and indicating the time they arrived. Then things got tense.

“When I was in the room it was very clear that we were outnumbered, I would say three to one,” Nesbitt said. Republican and Democrat poll challengers have different types of credentials, making it easy to tell how many Democratic challengers there were compared to Republican. Nesbitt estimates there were about 1,200 people in the hall but only about fifty or sixty GOP poll challengers—not enough to cover all of the tables where ballots were being counted.

Even so, when these Republican poll challengers came into the hall, the ballot-counting stopped. “It wasn’t too long after I got into the room that it became very apparent that there was no rush to be counting anything,” Nesbitt said. “For about four hours, over ninety percent of the counting boards had no activity.” ...

That wasn’t all. When election workers expelled a Republican poll challenger, the ballot counters erupted in cheers. “That was the first one that I had heard very large cheers for,” Nesbitt said. “I’ll admit, at first I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t know why the election workers would be so boisterous over something. But he was escorted out by the police.”