In the News

New York Times: 3 Georgia Women, Caught Up in a Flood of Suspicion About Voting

An election skeptic challenged hundreds of voter registrations, including one for a voting rights activist. A county official is dealing with the mess.

By Eli SaslowPhotographs by Hilary Swift
Sept. 15, 2024/Updated Sept. 16, 2024

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.

In Pittsburgh, a Trump supporter has challenged more than 25,000 people based mostly on change-of-address data, creating confusion among voters. In Detroit, teams of “election security” volunteers go door to door to verify people’s addresses and then file challenges based on what they find. An election-monitoring organization called True the Vote, which promoted conspiracy theories after the 2020 election, has armed its volunteers with a web-based app that allows them to “identify ineligible records and report findings.” The group says it has resulted in the filing of more than 640,000 challenges across 1,322 counties.

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, even as Strahl signs each of her emails with “respectfully” and thanks election officials at county board meetings for their work.

Now she spoke alongside other members of the Georgia Nerds inside the conference room 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, which included a few people who were beginning to file challenges of their own. 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 last few years, successfully removing thousands of names from the voter rolls in a state where President Biden won the last election by fewer than 12,000 votes.

Their work had inspired controversy across the state, but inside the room in Savannah, Strahl’s motives were seen as patriotic, and her intent pure.

“I’m here to help,” she said. “I’m not here to destroy.”

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. Back then, Georgians were allowed to challenge up to 10 people each year, and occasionally someone would challenge a family member who had been arrested, lost their mental capacity or moved out of state. 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 in the aftermath 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. Strahl also filed hundreds of challenges against voters who were already listed as inactive, which meant they were required to go through extra verification before they could vote on Election Day.

“I can think of a thousand better ways to use our time,” German said, as she handed one of Strahl’s boxes to her deputy, Roger Owens. “It’s busywork that muddies the waters.”

“I got another call this morning from a woman who was scared about whether or not she could still vote,” Owens said.

“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 though 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.

“Recognize the warning signs of someone on a path to violence,” read a pamphlet on de-escalation.

“Practice and prepare for worst-case scenarios,” read an active-shooter training manual for election officials, which went on to detail one such scenario. “A young man enters the polling station after waiting in line for over an hour. The man lifts his shirt, pulls a firearm from his waistband and begins shooting repeatedly, specifically targeting poll workers. Calls flood in to 911, with some callers claiming that the shooter is yelling about election rigging. What protocols exist for alerting staff or volunteers?”

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. There were more than 200,000 registered voters in Chatham County, and she prided herself on being fair to all of them, even those who wrote to her office to voice skepticism about the electoral process. That meant responding to every open-records request and examining the evidence for each of Strahl’s challenges, researching address data, fixing clerical errors, studying election statutes and then providing each voter with an opportunity to respond.

“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 last 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 first 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, which sold coffee and mail slots to people who were homeless or transient. 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. “Broke and just barely surviving” was how she remembered that time, but she was also 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. There were videos online in which the group spoke about “bloated voter rolls” and “rigged elections,” and then participated in a press conference to declare a “citizens state of emergency,” on the steps of the Georgia Capitol. But in Chatham County, Strahl’s challenges were unfolding mostly out of sight, at monthly Board of Registrars meetings in a nondescript office park. 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 earlier this year, after she challenged hundreds of people who 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.”

“It’s a whole mess,” Strahl said a few months later, after challenging people who listed their residential address at P.O. boxes, a campground and a Kroger grocery store where people sometimes slept outside.

“This targets a vulnerable population,” Smith said. “It goes against their constitutional rights.”

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 percent 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. Several protesters from Savannah State still stood up to speak at the end of the meeting to express first relief and then indignation.

“These are young people who have the desire to vote, and you are trying to take that away?” one speaker said.

“There’s an elephant in the room,” said another. “You went after Black people. If you want to be that vile, go after everybody.”

“Our voters should expect better,” Smith said.

What Smith thought they deserved was every legal opportunity to vote, so a few weeks later she loaded up her car with registration materials and drove into downtown Savannah. She stopped at a bus station and signed up two people who were on their way to work. She pulled into a gas station and registered another. Then she went into the courtyard of Union Mission’s homeless shelter, where about a dozen men were playing cards in the shade.

Smith had been talking to strangers about voting rights since she was 8 years old, when she campaigned with her father while he ran for local office in rural Tennessee, but lately she wondered if her life’s work amounted to a failure. Polls showed that about half of Georgians had lost faith in the electoral process. Less than 18 percent of registered voters in Chatham County cast a ballot in May’s primary election, and the turnout among young voters was less than 2 percent. Smith had voted for Republicans and Democrats, and her registration work was explicitly nonpartisan. She never asked people how they voted; what bothered her was how few voted at all.

She spotted a man sitting alone in the back of the courtyard and walked over to introduce herself. He said his name was Larry Mitchell, and he offered her a cigarette and shook her hand.

“Are you registered to vote?” she asked him.

“Nah, that’s not really for me,” he said.

“It’s supposed to be for everyone,” she said. “Why not?”

He explained that he’d lost his right to vote after going to prison in the late 1990s, and even though he’d served his time and restored his voting rights, it had been at least a decade since he cast a ballot. He remembered signing up in 2016, but then he lost his driver’s license before Election Day. The county was still sending his election mail to his parents’ house, but they’d been evicted during the aftermath of the pandemic, and Mitchell had spent the last three years bouncing between temporary apartments, shelters and city parks.

“This state doesn’t give a damn about what I think,” Mitchell said. He was a Black man who sometimes slept on park benches underneath Confederate monuments. He was a part-time, minimum-wage worker in a state that hadn’t raised the minimum wage from $7.25 in 15 years, even as the cost of living in coastal Georgia doubled.

“Why waste time on things that don’t change?” he said.

“Because it sounds like you have opinions,” Smith said. “This is one way to express them.”

“I guess that’s true,” he said.

She handed him a clipboard, and he put out his cigarette and began to fill out a registration form. Mitchell copied down his driver’s license number, wrote the address of his occasional shelter bed and signed his name. Smith took a picture and then submitted his form to the county as the latest piece of paperwork in an election that could hinge on Georgia, and on whether a few thousand people are eligible to vote.

“We’re all set?” Mitchell said. “It’s as easy as that?”

“I hope so,” Smith said. “It should be.”