Helen Strahl stood at the front of a conference room in Savannah, Ga., last month and looked out at her audience, the evolving face of election denialism in 2024. There were no armed militia groups in attendance, no would-be revolutionaries dressed in capes and horns. The crowd was mostly made up of retirees and professional women, including some who wore glasses and T-shirts that read: “Got data?”

They called themselves the Georgia Nerds, and their volunteer group had spent the last several months challenging voter rolls and expressing skepticism about the upcoming presidential election before either candidate received a single vote.

“Can everybody hear me in the back?” asked Strahl, 65. A few people shook their heads, so she tried again.

“I’ll speak up. Can you hear me now?”

A longtime compliance officer, Strahl had found her political voice during the last 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 a thousand 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 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.

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