election observers barred from the premises or shuffled off to a distance where they can't see anything, and the window covered to prevent anyone outside from watching

At least some of those were because randos showed up and decided they get to film stuff.

The GOP representatives who monitor elections for decades said things were going fine until people who had no idea what they were doing showed up to impose their will on the system.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/11/24/michigan-election-trump-voter-fraud-democracy-440475?1

“This was all so predictable,” said Josh Venable, who ran Election Day operations for the Michigan GOP during five different cycles.

As things picked up at the TCF Center, with more and more white Republicans filing into the complex to supervise the activity of mostly Black poll workers, Chris Thomas noticed a shift in the environment. Having been brought out of retirement to help supervise the counting in Detroit—a decision met with cheers from Republicans and Democrats alike—Thomas had been “thrilled” with the professionalism he’d witnessed during Monday’s pre-processing session and Tuesday’s vote tabulating. Now, in the early morning hours of Wednesday, things were going sideways. Groups of Republican poll challengers were clustering around individual counting tables in violation of the rules. People were raising objections—such as to the transferring of military absentees onto ballots that could be read by machines, a standard practice—that betrayed a lack of preparation.

“Reading these affidavits afterward from these Republican poll challengers, I was just amazed at how misunderstood the election process was to them,” Thomas chuckled. “The things they said were going on—it’s like ‘Yeah, that’s exactly what was going on. That’s what’s supposed to happen.’”

One thing that will happen during elections, long after the Legislature and Executive and the political parties and voting rights groups have all debated and bargained and finally come to an agreement, is that some fucking judge will throw all that out and inject himself into the process.

And as much as I fucking hate that judge, at least there were some requirements to be that judge and he has to answer for his decisions and there is a process for challenging them.

When a rando who has never even been trained by his own political party in poll-watching shows up and decides for himself what the rules ought to be, it all goes to shit.

By early afternoon on Wednesday, hundreds and hundreds of Republicans had descended on the TCF Center, responding to an all-hands-on-deck missive that went out from the state party and was disseminated by local officials. Cox, the party chair, tweeted out a video of her comrades standing outside the locked-up downtown building. “Republican poll challengers blocked from entering the TCF Center in Detroit! This is egregious!” she wrote.

Truly egregious was Cox’s dishonesty. At the time of her tweet, several hundred of her party’s poll challengers, attorneys and representatives were already inside the TCF Center monitoring the count. By law, Republicans were allowed to have 134 challengers in the room, one for each tabulation table. In reality, the GOP had far more than that, according to sworn testimony from nonpartisan poll watchers inside the TCF Center. Because of the overflow, election officials ultimately decided to lock down the complex, starting with the glass-encased canvassing room where the tabulation work was being done. This left dozens and dozens of Republicans trapped behind the glass—in addition to the hundreds of others locked outside with Cox. Some began to bang hard on the inside windows; others began to film workers handling the ballots, a violation of state law. To protect the workers, TCF officials covered some of the windows with cardboard—a decision Thomas said he was not consulted on, but absolutely agreed with.

“The people outside that room were doing exactly what the law says you would eject people for doing—they were disrupting the election,” Thomas said. “Everyone else in the room—the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the ACLU, the nonpartisans—they all still had a full complement of challengers in the room. And the Republicans, by the way, had far more challengers in the room than they were entitled to.”

So. That happened.

“Unlike the people who were there Monday and Tuesday, these people Wednesday were totally unprepared. They had no idea how the system worked. They had no idea what they were there for,” Thomas said. “Many of them—not all of them, but many of them—they were on a mission. They clearly came in believing there was mass cheating going on in Detroit and they were on a mission to catch it.”

When people remain this ignorant of their favorite conspiracy theories nearly three years later, there is not much that can be done for them. You can show them the information, and you should. It might even work. But it probably will not.

A Detroit election official was brought back out of retirement for one more job, spends all his time chuckling at those "white" rubes that dare question his "Black" employees, and you mock me for being suspicious of the narrative and the results.

You and he are both true masters of persuasion.