Editorial: A Shameful Early Voting Plan For Granville County

The comedian Chris Rock once famously quipped, "They don't want you to vote. If they did, we wouldn't vote on a Tuesday in November. You ever throw a party on a Tuesday? No — nobody would come."

Funny … and true. And yet, we have made strides as a country in ensuring that the sacred, constitutional right of all citizens to vote is made easy and accessible. Early voting, in one way or another, has been around since the Civil War. 

Early voting and easy access to the ballot is rooted in the fight for civil rights and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). That law, which has been gutted in recent years by the U.S. Supreme Court, finally guaranteed the right to vote and rolled back many of the racist Jim Crow policies that limited African Americans’ access to the ballot box for decades. 

For Black voters, the VRA was a game changer, and many Black communities started voting in greater numbers, including at early voting sites. 

On paper, the decision of the N.C. State Board of Elections on Granville County’s early voting sites doesn’t seem like a huge deal. A couple of sites were moved around, another was added, and some days and hours changed. 

Given alternative plans, it was deemed a bipartisan “compromise” by Republican state board member Stacy “Four” Egger IV, and it passed with a 4-1 vote on the state board made up of three Republicans and two Democrats. 

It earned a “yes” vote from Democratic state board member Siobhan O’Duffy Millen, who explained at last week’s N.C. State Board of Elections meeting: “I'm gonna vote ‘aye,’ reluctantly, because I think half a baby is better than none.” That’s because Egger and the board decided to keep a site that Democrats wanted at South Branch Library, in a majority-Black population center in the southwestern part of Granville County.  

Millen may have butchered the idiom “don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater,” but she actually came up with an even better metaphor for the compromise plan that was adopted.

To extend Millen’s unfortunate analogy, half a baby is still a dead baby. 

Why is the early voting plan so terrible? Because it nonsensically takes away the most popular early voting site in the whole county, located in the middle of the majority-Black Oxford, N.C., at the historic Public Works building. It’s no wonder the Public Works site is so popular, as exemplified by our graphic:

In 2024, 10,025 people voted at the Oxford Public Works early voting site — 40% of all early voters in Granville County. Of those, 3,897 (39%) were Black or Latino, many of whom live within walking distance or a short drive of the polling site. In fact, more people (3,511) live within walking distance of Oxford Public Works than all other current and previously proposed polling places combined. 

As we wrote at the time, these facts lead to an unsettling realization: If you want to decrease turnout among poor and working-class voters in Granville County, moving the Oxford early voting site out of the city center seems like an effective tactic. 

“Study after study shows that the closer someone lives to an early voting location, the more likely they are to cast a vote,” said Western North Carolina Political Science professor Chris Cooper in an interview with NBC news.

Of course, that’s not what Republican members of either the local or state boards who removed the site are saying. The most honest and perhaps the correct version of why it went down this way came from former Granville County Elections Board Chairman Larue Ulshafer, who said “the boss,” referring to Auditor Dave Boliek, a Republican whose office now houses the N.C. State Board of Elections, wanted it that way. 

At a local elections board meeting in Granville in July, Republican board members Debby Butler and Douglas Smith stonewalled questions about why they wanted the site moved. 

At one point, Butler offered a meek, “We (already) voted on a plan we agree with.” 

And even that sentiment didn’t really come from her. County Beacon published images from a local photographer revealing that it came from former Granville County GOP chair Michael Magnanti, who was texting the Republican board members what to say in real time from the front of the room. 

A bipartisan vote at the state level helps obscure the cynicism behind these moves, and, even though it wouldn’t have changed the outcome, Millen was wrong to back her Republican colleagues’ plan. 

Millen hadn’t been there to see the packed rooms of furious Oxford residents, largely people of color, who were losing their favored voting site and worry that this is just the beginning of what will happen in the years to come. 

A lot of the feedback from folks on County Beacon’s Facebook page boils down to “well, people can still vote so it’s not a big deal” or “Democrats would do it, too.” That completely misses the point. Everyone, regardless of party, should be concerned by a process that took away the county’s most popular early voting site, making it harder for the majority-Black city to vote, for no apparent reason other than “the boss” wanted it. Early voting sites should be placed where they make sense, and prioritize access for those who might have trouble getting transportation. Whether they will vote for Republicans or Democrats should have nothing to do with it.  

Granville Republicans could consider a different path on the county elections board. That could begin by taking a long look in the mirror and choosing to listen to their neighbors, regardless of who they vote for, over the “boss’s” crooked agenda cooked up in Raleigh.

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