3 Georgia Women, Caught Up in a Flood of Suspicion About Voting

Helen Strahl stood at the front of a conference room in Savannah, Georgia, last month and looked out at her audience, the evolving face of election denialism in 2024. The crowd was mostly made up of retirees and professional women, including some who wore T-shirts that read: “Got data?”

They called themselves the Georgia Nerds, and their volunteer group had spent the past several months challenging voter rolls and expressing skepticism about the upcoming presidential election.

A longtime compliance officer, Strahl had found her political voice during the past few years by taking advantage of a new Georgia law that allows private citizens to file mass challenges against other people’s eligibility to vote. She has legally challenged more than 1,000 voters in Chatham County during the past 18 months, quietly reshaping the electorate in a crucial stretch of coastal Georgia and amplifying conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud. She wrote to elections officials to question the eligibility of seasonal workers who moved temporarily out of state, homeless residents who didn’t have a proper address and almost 700 students or former students who were registered to vote at Savannah State University, one of the country’s oldest historically Black colleges.

“I live in this county,” she later explained. “I’d like to know my vote is going to count and not be diluted. It’s in my interest to help maintain a clean and accurate voting roll.”

It has become a popular tactic during a campaign season that has sometimes turned into a race between pro-democracy groups that try to register a historic number of voters and election deniers who try to inhibit registration drives and remove tens of thousands of people from the rolls. More than 40 states now allow for some type of voter challenges, and former President Donald Trump’s campaign has encouraged activists to focus on the voter rolls in a relatively small number of liberal counties that could swing the election.

But few activists have been as prolific as Strahl, who has won hundreds of challenges and left a trail of chaos in her wake: overwhelmed election officials who ran out of envelopes to respond to her challenges; confused voters who aren’t sure if they are eligible; enraged voting rights activists who allege voter suppression and intimidation.

Now she spoke alongside other members of the Georgia Nerds in Savannah as part of a presentation titled “How Georgia Elections Are Manipulated.” The group had filed a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in May to support a lawsuit against the Georgia secretary of state, alleging that state election officials had manipulated registration dates and created “phantom, fake” voters on the rolls. “Everything is in place for the Georgia 2024 general election to be stolen,” the group wrote.

Strahl finished her presentation and thanked the crowd. There were versions of Helen Strahl in at least a dozen other metropolitan Georgia counties — Earl Ferguson in Fulton County, Gail Lee in DeKalb, Merry Belle Hodges in Gwinnett, and on it went. Together, a group of about a dozen activists had filed more than 100,000 individual challenges in Georgia in the past few years, successfully removing thousands of names from the voter rolls in a state where President Joe Biden won the last election by fewer than 12,000 votes.

Strahl alphabetized and stapled her challenges and then delivered them to the office of Sabrina German, director of the Chatham County Board of Registrars. “Good Lord, can we ever catch a break?” German wondered one afternoon, as she counted 11 cardboard boxes stacked in the corner of her office, each one labeled “Strahl.” She sifted through the files and ran the math in her head: It took one election clerk up to 40 hours to handle a box of Strahl’s challenges. German had eight people on her staff. That meant almost half of her team had been working essentially full-time on Strahl’s boxes for the past weeks instead of preparing for a presidential election that German already considered the most stressful of her career.

She had worked as a clerk for 25 years, and during the first two decades she remembered only a handful of voter challenges. Mostly it was up to election officials and the secretary of state’s office to clean the voter rolls, and Georgia updated hundreds of thousands of records each year after voters moved, died or changed their voting status. “People believed in the system and trusted us to do our jobs,” German said.

But after of the 2020 election, Georgia’s Republican-led Legislature passed an election integrity law that permitted any registered voter to file an unlimited number of challenges. The law required election clerks to schedule hearings and send up to four letters to each voter in question, which meant German’s office was mailing thousands of additional letters each month.

Many of Strahl’s challenges were against voters who German said would eventually be taken off the rolls anyway as part of Georgia’s standard list maintenance — people who had died, committed felonies or voted in other states.

“I can think of a thousand better ways to use our time,” German said. “It’s busywork that muddies the waters.”

“It’s driving me crazy,” German said, because what bothered her more than the work itself was what she believed the boxes had come to represent: distrust, denialism, the eroding faith in democracy that she now felt hanging over so many parts of her job. It was the signs on the office wall about “suspicious packages,” and the new protocol that required all staff to wear gloves while opening the mail. It was the law enforcement agents and Homeland Security officials who sometimes came to speak at their meetings. It was the endless series of staff trainings about threats she’d never heard of before 2020 — things like “spoofing” and “swatting” — and that made her feel, she said, as if someone expected her to “leave work in a body bag.”

“Expect conspiracies, anger and vitriol,” read a briefing memo on how to manage voting locations in 2024.

This was now German’s job on so many fronts — to stand before a wave of malevolence and respond with calm, with decency, with evenhandedness and bureaucratic protocols.

“Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter,” she wrote, in a letter that her office mailed to each challenged voter, and then she moved to the next name on the list.

Carry Smith had spent the past two decades traveling around the coastal floodplains of Georgia with a card table and a clipboard, searching for unregistered voters. She had found them on peanut farms and late-night city buses, in rural churches and shelters for abused women. Smith had personally helped register more than 15,000 voters, lately as the regional director of a nonprofit called the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda. She was one of the state’s most dedicated voting-rights advocates, but this time the rights in question were her own.

“This letter is to inform you that your right to vote in Chatham County is being challenged by Helen Strahl,” read the notice that Smith received in the mail from German’s office, in 2022.

Smith had been challenged along with dozens of others because she had potentially violated federal policy by listing her residential address at a business — a place called the Mailbox Cafe. Smith had rented a mailbox because she was staying with a different friend every few weeks while she commuted to Atlanta to finish her doctoral degree in political science. She was uniquely equipped to respond to a voter challenge.

She called the registrars office, explained her situation and changed her address to the apartment where she was sleeping on a couch. Strahl’s challenge was denied, and Smith decided to start “challenging the challenger,” she said.

Smith was finishing her dissertation on the intricacies of voter suppression, and she began researching Strahl and eventually learned about the Georgia Nerds. In Chatham County, Strahl’s challenges were unfolding mostly out of sight, at monthly Board of Registrars meetings. Smith started attending the meeting each month, listening to Strahl’s testimony and occasionally making her own statements to the board.

“There’s just weird things that shouldn’t be happening,” Strahl said this year, after she challenged hundreds of people whom she believed had moved out of state.

“Mrs. Strahl is not an expert,” Smith told the board. “The state’s voter list maintenance is very sophisticated.”

Smith recruited more people to protest Strahl’s challenges, and each month a bigger crowd came to the board meetings as Strahl’s efforts seemed to intensify. Strahl submitted about 900 challenges in May. She emailed the board a list of more than 20,000 registrations in June that she thought were eligible for “list maintenance processing” before the election. A few weeks after that, she sent the board a letter about an “anomaly” of 689 students and former students registered at one street address at Savannah State University, which is 85% Black.

The board decided at a meeting in late July that Strahl hadn’t provided enough documentation in her latest batch of letters to force any more removals. Her challenges would be tabled until after November, because federal law prohibits systemic changes to the voter rolls within 90 days of an election.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .