Georgia Republican Party activist Pam Reardon questioned the right of 32,132 of her neighbors to have their ballots counted during the 2020 election. Alton Russell, the chairman of the Republican Party in Columbus, Georgia, personally challenged the right of about 4,000 voters to cast a ballot in 2020.

These two pro-Trump activists are not government officials. They are self-appointed watchdogs looking for voter fraud, using the old Jim Crow laws that allow any voter to challenge an unlimited number of other voters in their county.

That should scare Vice President Kamala Harris. In 2020, the organization that organized the elections, True the Vote of Texas, put 88 vigilantes on the ballot, all in Georgia. This year they registered again 40,000 Vigilantes and proudly announced that by August they had already challenged 852,381 voters across the country, with the goal of reaching two million voters by Tuesday's election. And several other vigilante groups with names like The Pig Pen Project and Election Research Group have gotten in on the action, challenging voters in Nevada, Pennsylvania and other swing states.

Unfortunately, while the NAACP, Black Voters Matter, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition and other front organizations have sued over these challenges, the U.S. Department of Justice is nowhere to be seen.

I interviewed Republican Chairman Russell Vigilantes, Inc.the documentary I produced, and he came to our interview actually dressed as Wild West vigilante Doc Holliday, with a pearl-handled six-shot rifle in a holster (which he told me was loaded).

Russell's voter list included black soldiers stationed at Fort Moore, Georgia. I met with one of those he challenged, career military specialist Maj. Gamaliel Turner. The 70-year-old black man was temporarily stationed by the military at a naval base in California.

His mail-in ballot never arrived. So he called his local election officials, who told him, “Mr. Turner, you have been challenged.” He would get his ballot if he came to their office and provided proof of his citizenship and local address, they said.

Turner responded: “So you're telling me 2,600 miles away, two or three days before an election, that if I want to vote, all I have to do is vote turn up and as an American citizen prove that I have the right to vote? Again?”

For Turner, it was just modernizing Jim Crow. “It’s nothing more than a poll tax,” he says, the old trick used for decades in the South to keep blacks from voting.

The wound was deep. His father, Rev. Harold Turner, co-founded, along with Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights organization Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC.

Ultimately, Major Turner had to fly a lawyer from Washington, D.C. to Georgia under a federal judge's order to have his vote counted. However, thousands of other citizens lost their votes.

A new law in Georgia this year, SB 189, makes it easier to challenge voters by extending the challenge period up to and including Election Day, according to Georgia NAACP Chairman Gerald Griggs. In a state where the presidential election will likely be decided, Griggs expects more than 300,000 challenges in Georgia alone.

Now the vigilante virus has spread outside of Georgia. There is an explosive increase in vigilante groups in the contested states, numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

My bipartisan investigative team called 800 voters on the True the Vote challenge lists. An overwhelming share of voters targeted were black — and were surprised to learn that their ballots could not be counted unless they proved they were citizens.

Mass protests against black voters are not new. This tactic was last used in 1946, when the Ku Klux Klan launched a plan to challenge every black voter in Georgia. Now the Klan plan has become the MAGA plan.

In 1946, the Klan managed to elect one of them, Eugene Talmadge, as governor of Georgia. The FBI prepared an indictment to charge Talmadge with criminal violation of the 15th Amendment by denying a citizen the right to vote based on skin color. But before he could be handcuffed, Talmadge drank himself to death.

Unfortunately, today, with many courts dominated by Trump appointees, judges are allowing these new racial challenges to persist.

Trump's MAGA activists justify the vigilante attacks with the baseless claim that literally millions of illegal voters are on the voter rolls, including undocumented voters and voters who vote multiple times. The widely debunked conspiracy film 2000 mules, Launched by True the Vote and Trump at Mar-a-Lago and seen by 10 million Trump fanatics, the show features black men who were allegedly caught on camera criminally stuffing ballot boxes.

This is an old motif taken from the 1915 Klan propaganda film. The birth of a nation, It featured a white actor in blackface stuffing an extra vote into a ballot box.

Neither True the Vote nor any other Trump-backed vigilante group, despite challenging thousands, have identified a single voter who could be arrested — except one: Mark Andrews. Andrews, who is black, actually cast his family's ballots legally — and sued the film's distributor to have it removed. The film's distributor had to apologize and pulled the film from all platforms.

25 years ago I shared a story The Guardian This shocked the USA: Before the election in 2000, the state of Florida removed tens of thousands of blacks from the Florida voter rolls. Yet despite this ugly racial purge of the voter rolls, George W. Bush was declared the winner in Florida (by just 537 votes) and became president.

When I wrote this exposé in 2000, I thought it would be the end of these Jim Crow tactics. But now, as the NAACP's Griggs says, we are facing “Jim Crow 2.0,” with racist attacks now aided by AI tricks. For example, Cleta Mitchell, Trump's lawyer who participated in the infamous phone call with Trump demanding that Georgia's secretary of state “find” 11,780 ballots, is promoting AI-based software to target voters for vigilante challenges.

I have worked with the NAACP, Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH, and the National Bar Association (an organization of black lawyers) helping tens of thousands of black Americans overcome the obstacle course that vigilantes have placed between these voters and their vote.

But there is a real danger that in a nation that presents itself as a fountainhead of democracy, vigilantes, not voters, will elect our president.