MADISON, Wis.—The same election commission that banned a 78-year-old poll monitor from observing next month’s election is pushing a policy that would keep election observers farther away from voters.

Wisconsin Act 177, which into effect in April, allows the chief election inspector or municipal clerk to restrict the viewing area of poll observers to an area “not less than three feet nor more than 8 feet from the table at which electors announce their names and addresses to be issued a voting number a polling place.”

Before the revised law, there was no specific designation of distance involving observers. That was left up to local election officials.

The law was crafted in part because of entities such as the Milwaukee Election Commission, which, before the specific distance parameters, kept election observers between six feet and 12 feet away, depending on the space available at the individual polling place.

Poll watchers complained that, at 12 feet, observation became impossible.

With the changes in place, the Democrat-heavy commission appears to be looking at erring on the far side of the law—backed by the city attorney’s guidance.

The “Election Commission may restrict the location of election observers from between six to eight feet,” City Attorney Grant Langley and two of his assistant wrote in a recently obtained letter, dated May 1, to Neil Albrecht, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission.

“We believe that this would adequately allow observers to fully observe the election process while at the same time maintaining confidential elector information,” Langley wrote.

That’s the balance that must be struck, election officials say—the citizens’ right to observe the integrity of elections against a voter’s right to privacy.

Campaign and election law expert Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, said the rule is “ridiculous.”

“Poll watchers operate under very strict rules. They know they can only observe, but they have a right to see everything going on, including watching election officials check the voter names on a voting list,” said von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.

“Any rule that keeps an observer so far away that they are unable to properly observe is not just improper, it’s wrong,” he said. “It negates the whole purpose of having poll watchers of both parties there, so they can make sure election officials are doing everything according to law.”

Negating the work of poll observers might just be the intention, according to Marguerite Ingold, the long-time Republican election observer in Democrat-dense Milwaukee who has been banned from monitoring next month’s elections in the city.

The 78-year-old grandmother’s apparent crime? She raised concerns about campaign and election violations at a Milwaukee nursing home where city-employed special voting deputies were helping residents vote.

Albrecht, in a letter banning Ingold, claimed the volunteer observer was being disruptive, a charge Ingold denies. Albrecht, according to Ingold, told the elderly woman he took the step to block her from the polls because he thought Ingold might have become violent and stormed City Hall.

She said she believes the Milwaukee Election Commission’s harsh and unusual punishment is all about intimidation.

With Wisconsin’s on-again-off-again voter ID law now off again, thanks to intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court, election integrity advocates feel the role of the observer will be even more critical in next month’s election.

Read more on Watchdog.org.