Spalding County, Georgia – The rumour sprouted from a dumpster tucked behind an election office in rural Georgia.

A video posted on social media – which spread rapidly – claimed that valid ballots had been trashed in Spalding County, about 64km (40 miles) south of the capital, Atlanta, in the wake of the closely fought 2020 race between US President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

The narrative – which was probed and quickly debunked by local police – added to a constellation of falsehoods about widespread misconduct in the vote spread by Trump and his allies. Nearly four years later, an onslaught of audits, investigations and court cases has failed to yield any evidence of widespread fraud that could have even come close to turning the election result.

But the words of Trump and his allies have continued to resonate – informing the thinking of voters, officials and elected legislators as the current race between Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris enters its final days.

That was particularly apparent on a bright day in Spalding – a reliably Republican county with a population of about 67,000 – as voters trickled through the election office in a grey strip mall outside of the county’s largest city, Griffin.

Despite the many debunks of the claims of vote tampering, Teresa Carter, a 69-year-old retired Christian school teacher, said she had not realised the extent of what she thought of as election fraud before 2020.

Carter, who voted with her husband, Scott, pointed to the high cost of living as the motivator behind her vote for Trump, describing how she and her husband often have to put back groceries at the store when they see the final bill.

But she also referenced the notion that a water main break in Atlanta may have led to election misconduct that, in turn, could have affected Georgia’s final vote count in 2020. It is one of many claims – pushed by Trump but vehemently denied by the state’s Republican election officials – that continues to cast a long shadow for Carter.

“I do worry about election fraud,” Carter said. “I’m just praying that they’ll take care of it and it’ll go smooth.”

Scott, a local photographer, added he believes there remains a threat to the integrity of the current election and that some form of malfeasance could affect the vote.

“I think there’s a good chance of it, but I can’t say for sure,” he told Al Jazeera. “We’ll find out when the count gets counted.”

Polls have shown the Carters are not alone. Most recently, an NPR Marist poll found that 86 percent of Republicans considered themselves concerned or very concerned about fraud in the upcoming vote, far outpacing the 33 percent of Democrats who shared those worries.

Other polls have shown many Republicans believe that Biden won illegitimately. About 57 percent of Republicans said so in an August 2023 poll conducted by AP-NORC, against about 2 percent of Democrats.

The sentiment was not difficult to find among other early voters in Spalding County, where 60 percent of voters cast ballots for Trump in 2020.

Hanna Smith, a 36-year-old ultrasound tech who sported a Georgia voting sticker touting “I secured my vote”, described Trump as “pro-life, pro-gun, pro-everything I believe in”.

She also said she believed fraud may have changed the outcome of the 2020 race.

“Probably, it wouldn’t surprise me,” she told Al Jazeera. “People are crooked”.

Trump lost the state to Biden in 2020 by just 11,779 votes. It was the first time a Democratic presidential candidate had won in Georgia since 1992, a phenomenon largely attributed to the state’s shifting demographics.

As Trump and a team of affiliated lawyers and surrogates pushed false claims that the outcomes in several key states were illegitimate, he set his sights on the close margins in Georgia.

The then-president famously urged the state’s top election official – a Republican – to “find” the votes needed to overcome his loss to Biden.

Trump has since been indicted on state charges related to efforts to subvert the vote, a case that has ensnared several local Republican officials, lawyers and even a pastor.

The trial is currently pending, although a Trump victory could see the case paused for the foreseeable future.

Labeled by critics as the “Big Lie”, Trump’s enduring hold over the Republican party has seen the increasing embrace of the election misinformation he has spread.

In the final stretch of the 2024 presidential election, the effect on both rank-and-file members of the party –  and elected officials from every level of government – has become increasingly clear.

A recent Washington Post analysis found at least 236 Republican candidates running for Congress or top state offices across the country in 2024 have used social media to cast doubt on the 2020 election result.

A May report by States United Action found nearly a third of current lawmakers in the US Congress – about 170 in total – had in some way supported Trump’s effort to overturn the vote. So-called “election deniers” also have a sizeable presence across state legislatures in key battlegrounds, the organisation found in a separate report.

In September, the Center for Media and Democracy identified 102 election officials across eight key states – Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan – who had either denied the “legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election or spread false claims of widespread voter fraud”.

Three of those officials make up the 3-2 Republican majority of the Spalding County election board, which is tasked with certifying the election results.

In a statement upon the report’s release, the Center for Media and Democracy’s executive director Arn Pearson, said: “While it is highly unlikely that these officials, along with deniers in Congress, will be able to prevent certification of the 2024 election results, they are in a prime position to force litigation and delay what should be a ministerial task while they and their allies whip up false claims of voter fraud, noncitizen voting, and a stolen election.”

As the rumours surrounding the dumpster and the false claims of thrown-out ballots spread, Ben Johnson, a local tech entrepreneur, tweeted at L Lin Wood, a lawyer who led efforts to challenge the 2020 results in Georgia and Michigan on behalf of Trump.

Johnson claimed to have “the source video for ballots found in the dumpster in Spalding County”, as reported by the Daily Beast, citing since-deleted posts.

Less than a year later, Johnson, whose posts also appear to support pro-QAnon conspiracy theories, became chair of the Spalding County election board.

Most recently, in August, Gabriel Sterling, a top Republican election official in the state, posted on X that the “actual evidence points to no fraud” in Georgia’s 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections.

Johnson shot back, “Gabe’s pic(ture) is beside the definition of #gaslighting on dictionary.com”

But Dexter Wimbish, a local lawyer and one of two Democratic members on the election board, feels there is more behind Johnson’s appointment. Prior to 2020, the election board was divided evenly between Republicans and Democrats. The fifth and final member was chosen by coin toss.

But after the election, Republican state legislators passed a law mandating that three top county judges instead choose the final board member. As those judges are conservative, Wimbish explained, the change all but guaranteed that Republicans would dominate the board.

“I really believe that Spalding County is sort of a test site for the right in terms of coming up with local strategies to to interfere with the election process,” Wimbish said.

He pointed to a recent decision by the board to require hand-counting audits of one local and one federal race, which he argued could lead to protracted litigation after election day, while stoking confusion.

Concerns peaked when Georgia’s state board passed new election rules that allowed county officials to investigate and potentially not certify election results in some cases. A report by Pro-Publica identified Spalding, along with Troup and Ware, as counties in Georgia with election boards dominated by election sceptics that could have outsized influence in light of those rules.

However, a Georgia judge has since declared the new rules “illegal, unconstitutional and void”, saying that local officials were mandated to certify the election results. The state’s Supreme Court has said it will not intervene before the election.

But in places like Spalding County, there may still be trouble, local observers warn.

Wimbish, the Democrat member of the Spalding County election board, told Al Jazeera, “it’s clear that the majority of the board welcomes litigation because they think the litigation is going to bring about their their desired outcome…I still think there’s a strong possibility that we’re going to see some sort of election controversy in Spalding County with the upcoming election.”

Elbert Solomon, the vice chair of the Spalding County Democratic Committee, has also been a vocal critic of the new board.

“Here in Spalding, if they could come up with some reason not to certify the election, I believe they would,” Solomon told Al Jazeera from his office in Griffin.

“They have the majority vote.”

For his part, Johnson has maintained during public meetings that the board seeks to act in a non-partisan manner. He did not respond to a request for an interview from Al Jazeera.

Back in front of the Spalding County election office, several voters said the changes have added new layers to the already tense final days of the US election campaign.

Rebecca Hazlett, a 47-year-old social worker, said she has seen misinformation beginning to spread in some online local community groups.

“I try not to think about it a whole lot; it tends to make you upset and depressed, to be frank,” said Hazlett, a Harris supporter who said she was voting to “protect rights for autonomy for women’s bodies, for my daughter”.

Alan H, a retiree who had worked in manufacturing and did not want to give his full name, said he was voting for Trump in spite of his fraud claims. He called the former president’s crusade in 2020 a “big mistake”.

The 79-year-old said he did not believe fraud played a major role in the 2020 vote and took issue with how Trump treated fellow Republican officials in Georgia, particularly popular governor Brian Kemp – who refused to back Trump’s stolen election claims in 2020.

“I thought it was stupid of him. A lot of voters in Georgia, I think, felt that way,” he told Al Jazeera. “But if you’re looking for the perfect candidate, you’re not gonna find one.”

Trump voter Chuck Hammill, a 58-year-old salesman, also decried what he called the division that the aftermath of the 2020 vote caused in Georgia. But he said he didn’t blame Trump for his effort to overturn the vote.

“He’s got his point of view, and he’s going to stand behind that,” he told Al Jazeera.

But what did Hammill think of the final result in Georgia in 2020?

“I think Trump did win,” he said.

This is the second part of a series of reports on the US election 2024 from Georgia. You can find the first dispatch here.