Ashlyn Preaux, a twenty-eight-year-old resident of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, has been trying to ask her congressman challenging questions for months. She lives in South Carolina’s Seventh Congressional District, which has been represented by the Republican Tom Rice, a fifty-nine-year-old right-to-life advocate and former tax lawyer, since 2013. Rice also lives in Myrtle Beach. Preaux attended his last two town halls, in February and April. At the first, Preaux, a self-described stay-at-home mom and Hillary Clinton supporter, managed to ask Rice about health care. “Health care here is terrible, mainly because Republicans didn’t want to take the Medicaid expansion,” she told me over the phone recently. Rice, she said, “avoided answering me about that by redirecting the question.” At the next town hall, she fared worse. “I just held my hand up the whole time and never got called on. Maybe he recognized me.”

Last week, Preaux received an automated e-mail from Rice—she’s on his mailing list—inviting his constituents to “discuss issues impacting our community, state and country” on Monday. Not in person, though: this would be a conference call, and the questions would be screened by Rice’s aides. Tele-town halls, as they’re called, are increasingly popular with members of Congress. According to Nathan Williams, the director of Town Hall Project, a progressive nonprofit created earlier this year to help foster and monitor civic engagement, there have been at least three hundred tele-town halls in 2017, most of them held by Republicans. Sometimes, “tele-town halls make perfect sense, especially when Congress is in session,” Williams said. This, according to Rice’s press secretary, Cassie Boehm, was the reason Rice used the format this week: because he’s currently in D.C. But after a year in which several Republican members of Congress have faced hostile town-hall crowds, worried and angry about the G.O.P.’s plans for health-care reform, Williams fears that these calls are replacing “in-person accessibility.” He noted that, on occasion, constituents are called out of the blue, during the workday, with an announcement that a tele-town hall is starting momentarily. In some cases, he said, there has been no prior announcement.

Participating in a tele-town hall is a multi-step process. Typically, constituents are given a number to call and a PIN code to enter. That PIN takes them to a conference line, often hosted by the company Access Live. Callers are invited to submit questions by pressing another code. Then, sitting at home, or wherever they prefer to spend lots of time on the phone, they will listen to their representative recite talking points from a D.C. office in response to a small number of accepted, pre-screened questions. Many of these are softballs. One constituent whose call was put through during a tele-town hall held, in June, by the Republican Rodney Frelinghuysen, who represents New Jersey’s Eleventh Congressional District, said, “I just wanted to let you know how difficult it must be for you to make a decision in the health package. And I think you’re doing a good job.”

Voters who are less happy with their representatives have also been trying to get through. Left-leaning constituents in Frelinghuysen’s district, who have come together under the banner NJ 11th for Change, have been preparing pointed questions for the congressman, who has avoided in-person town halls and other public events in his district for months. Knowing he’ll likely dodge their queries, they’ve taken to live-tweeting the calls, recording them, and posting the resulting audio files online. Local media have cited the group’s tele-town-hall transcripts in stories examining Frelinghuysen’s seeming reclusiveness.

Ezra Levin, the co-executive director of the progressive Indivisible Project, which offers tactics for opposing President Trump’s policy agenda, sees these local stories as a small victory. Tele-town halls, he told me, are part of a range of “sham town halls,” which also include “I.R.L. events, where questions are pre-screened and dissenters are ignored or cut off.” The point of tele-town halls, in Levin’s view, “is just to create the perception of listening, for reëlection purposes.” I asked Levin if the goal of Indivisible and its offshoots was to have a fruitful back-and-forth with conservative representatives. The goal, he said, was to “fuel a grassroots movement of locally-led progressive groups in order to fight Trump’s agenda and advance both progressive policies and candidates.” This might manifest in dialogue, he said, “but if representatives refuse the dialogue, then constituents still exert pressure.” A group in Virginia put a man in a chicken suit onstage at a town hall in place of an absent congressman. “That gets press and puts pressure on a representative to show up next time,” Levin said.

Preaux read Indivisible’s guide to progressive infiltration of conservative tele-town halls before dialing into Rice’s event on Monday. (Sample tip: “When you call into their Tele-Town Hall and get connected to a screener, be warm, polite, and vague.”) She had her question ready. It was the first town hall of any kind in the country since the latest Republican health-care plan was unveiled, late last week. Preaux is also concerned about gun violence in the Myrtle Beach area. But she decided to instead ask Rice about H.R. 806, a bill related to ground-level ozone standards, sponsored by a Republican from Texas. How would Rice vote on it? She had a hunch. “I wanted to get him on record,” Preaux told me. “And I definitely planned on challenging him.”

At half past five, sitting in her living room, Preaux got on the line and waited while Muzak played on her cell phone. Finally, a robot voice: “To ask a question, press star, three.” Each constituent could submit a single query. Then Rice came on. He spent ten minutes reading a bullet-pointed preamble. “We don’t want to hide from you,” he said. He proceeded to answer twelve questions. They concerned the inadequacy of the V.A., jobs for young people, and the status of funding for Trump’s promised border wall. “Fixed fortifications are not as effective as they were in medieval times,” Rice, who has supported the wall, said. Two more callers wondered about the progress of a new highway that is slowly being constructed in the district. “Infrastructure equals opportunity,” Rice replied. “But I’m obviously not a contractor.” He didn’t know why it was taking so long.

A caller who identified herself as a “Republican since I was eighteen”—and whose name Preaux recognized from Rice’s Facebook page, where the caller frequently posts comments critical of Obama and in praise of Trump—was then given the floor. “It really hurts me to know that the Republicans in the House are not standing behind our President,” she said. “What can you do to help solve that situation?” Rice took a breath. “Donald Trump,” he began. “I agree with pretty much all of his stated policies, ninety-five per cent of them. His method of delivery bothers me.” Rice called tax reform “the most important thing we can do.” As for Obamacare, he said, “I’d vote for a repeal tomorrow.” He’s not in lockstep with the President on everything, though: he assured one caller of his opposition to offshore drilling, which is unpopular with some local Republicans. “It’s impractical,” he said. Fracking worked much better, anyway, he added.

Neither Preaux nor the handful of progressives she knew who’d also phoned in were called upon. “I have to go vote, so this concludes our call tonight,” Rice finally said, after fifty-nine minutes. “If you haven’t had a chance to ask your question, you’ll be automatically directed to my voice mail as soon as the call is over. My job title is representative, and I can’t do that unless I hear from you.”

Afterward, Preaux told me that she was “very frustrated, but not surprised by how it went.” She continued, “I think he got a lot of easy, fluff questions from people who clearly were his supporters. He also kept bashing the A.C.A. and said he’d love to repeal even without a replacement, which would leave tens of thousands of people here in District Seven without health care!” Where did this leave her? “I’ll continue calling, writing, and faxing my feelings,” she said. And, if Rice puts on an I.R.L. town hall again—as, during the call, he promised to do, in August—“I’ll be there.” An hour later, a Times update appeared on her phone. “House Bill Collapses With Dissent of Two G.O.P. Senators,” it read. Rice’s side had lost.