Granville County elections officials were communicating with a former Republican Party official during a public hearing on where the board should open early voting sites, according to public records obtained by WRAL Investigates. 

The text messages come to light after critics accused the board of avoiding sites in the county that would have been more convenient for the Black and Hispanic residents, who make up a majority of the population in those towns. 

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The Republican-controlled Granville County’s elections board on July 15 rejected a proposal for early voting sites in Oxford and Creedmoor, two of the county’s largest towns. The state elections board, which also has a GOP majority, later overturned one of the county’s decisions and decided to open a site in Creedmoor. The county's Oxford early voting location was moved from the Oxford Public Works building.

The county has four early voting sites, according to the board of elections website:

  • Granville County Convention and Expo Center (4185 US Highway 15, Oxford)
    • South Branch Library (1550 South Campus Drive, Creedmoor)
      • Tar River Elementary School (2642 Philo White Road, Franklinton)
        • Stovall Branch Library (300 Main Street, Stovall) 

          Records obtained by WRAL show that former Granville County Republican Party Chairman Mike Magnanti sent nearly 200 text messages to Granville County elections board member Debby Butler during the board’s July meeting. 

          During the board’s discussions, Magnanti at times texted Butler specific instructions such as “just say no” and “interrupt her” and “just vote no.”

          Multiple people reached out to WRAL after the meeting, concerned about how the messages could have influenced decision-making. 

          Butler, who also serves as the Granville board’s secretary, presided over the July meeting because the former chairman had resigned. Records show she responded to some of Magnanti’s texts during the meeting. “I can’t do this,” Butler wrote at one point, adding later:“I want to give in.”

          “We are almost there. You’re doing great,” Magnanti responded.

          Sandra Cole Rodger, an Oxford resident, snapped photos of the texts that circulated on social media following the meeting.To verify independently, WRAL Investigates requested the texts through a public records request from the Granville Board of Elections.Rodger’s photos and the records from the county show that at least one other board member, Douglas Smith, also received texts from Magnanti.Email records show that both Smith and Butler originally deleted the texts. Both are Republican Party appointees, and both voted in favor of shutting down the polling places in question.

          “I had forgotten to set my phone to silent during the meeting. When I heard my alerts tone, I realized my error and silenced my phone without reading any texts. After the meeting adjourned, I quickly glanced at them and, seeing they were some form of comments pertaining to meeting protocol from Mike and no longer relevant, I deleted them all,” Smith wrote in an email to director Tonya Burnette.

          Butler went through her cellphone company in order to fulfill the request. In an email to Burnette, Butler wrote: “He was encouraging me, keep going, almost there, ask for a motion – nothing evil.”

          WRAL Investigates reached out to Magnanti, Butler and Smith, but only Magnanti responded. In an interview, he said the texts weren’t nefarious. He was just trying to offer support to the board members, he said, as well as guidance on lowering the temperature in the room as the crowd became increasingly frustrated with the Republicans’ explanations.

          “I just was texting [board member Douglas Smith], ‘Please no more comments,’ because it wasn't helping,” Magnanti told WRAL. “It was hurting him. It was just fomenting more anger, the more he said.”

          As for his texts to Butler telling her to interrupt speakers or push through a vote, Magnanti said he was simply reminding her of the procedural guide, called Robert’s Rules of Order, that public officials use to run meetings in an organized fashion.

          He said critics of the plans didn’t appear to him to be saying anything new that might have added to the debate — so he felt it would’ve been within those rules for Butler to wrap the meeting up and stop speakers from repeating the same complaints about losing the polling places.

          “Sometimes what will happen in a contentious meeting is the side that is on the losing side, the minority side, they will get angry,” Magnanti said. “And then they will just start to repeat themselves. And it's the job of the chair — one of the jobs of the chair — to not allow that to happen. Because then you're just re-chewing yesterday's breakfast.”

          Republican political operative Dallas Woodhouse said he does not believe the situation is unusual. 

          "Anybody's free to give advice [and] anybody's free to listen or not listen it,” he said. “We are dealing with human beings that have friendships and relationships and they often rely on advice or are giving unsolicited advice that's part of the system.”

          Woodhouse is the former North Carolina Republican Party executive director who was hired to help oversee county-level election boards last year after a new law flipped control of elections administration to the Republican Party. He resigned from that role earlier this year, after similar public records requests showed similar messages from him to county elections officials during meetings on other contentious topics, such as shutting down an on-campus polling place at Western Carolina University.

          Magnanti was one of more than 20 speakers who spoke during the Granville elections board’s July 15 meeting. Magnanti defended the board against accusations of racism. 

          “You guys are not racist, because you’ve decided to move the polling places,” he said. “The South Branch Library is a dangerous site. An election there is set up in the parking lot…There is no question that the Tar River Elementary School is a better site and is a safer site.”

          Sharyn Alarez, a Democrat on Granville’s elections board, said the county had previously opened early voting sites in Oxford and Creedmoor because “the population warranted it, the voting numbers warranted it.”

          She continued: “To say that we’re calling you racist because we’re pointing out the fact that this will disproportionately impact certain groups of people, I think that’s going a bit overboard.”

          “I didn’t think it was fair to take a site from the south. The reason we had two sites was because the population warranted it, the voting numbers warranted it,” Alvarez said during the meeting.

          Granville's decision to exclude proposed early voting sites in Oxford and Creedmoor generated discussion at the state elections board's Aug. 20 hearing. Critics of the plan noted that Black and Hispanic residents make up a majority of the population in those towns.

           The state elections board rejected a proposed site in Oxford, but reinstalled a site in Creedmoor. Cumberland County’s election board similarly voted to close a polling site in Spring Lake, another majority-minority town. That decision was approved last month by the State Board of Elections.

          Granville County's plan was one of the few GOP-backed plans that the state board didn't approve outright.

          Woodhouse said that decision was a compromise that addressed concerns from both sides of the aisle.

          “Everybody from all sides have a right to try to influence the process that is how the system is designed and that's how it works,” he said.