New Hampshire's Dixville Notch may lose its first-in-nation voting status

[brooklynite]

Washington Examiner

The New Hampshire hamlet of Dixville Notch is in danger of breaking its decades-long tradition of voting at the earliest possible moment in presidential primaries.

The tiny community traditionally comes together at midnight on the day of the New Hampshire primary to cast their votes. The entire voting population of Dixville Notch has never been more than a few dozen people, but everyone who is old enough to vote has shown up to cast paper ballots in a wooden box on the first day of voting for over six decades.

In 1976, President Gerald Ford ran away with the Dixville Notch vote, beating challenger Ronald Reagan 11 votes to four. In 2008, Sen. Barack Obama won with seven votes while Sen. John Edwards received two votes, and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson got one. In 2016, John Kasich won Dixville Notch with three votes, and Donald Trump came in second with two.

The town is in danger of breaking its tradition for the 2020 presidential election because it does not have enough residents to legally staff a polling place, according to the Boston Globe. Dixville Notch needs five residents in order to fill the necessary positions, and it currently only has four.

[nycbos]

1. That's too bad.

Have you ever watching the "Hartsfield Landing" of the West Wing? The town is based on Dixvillie Notch"

[elleng]

2. Yes, too bad,

and HAVE watched WW re: Hartsfield Landing!



P.S. 'Clark wins Dixville Notch

Tuesday, January 27, 2004 Posted: 10:19 AM EST (1519 GMT)

CLARK WINS: Wesley Clark won the initial votes cast Tuesday morning in New Hampshire's Democratic presidential primary, but final pre-primary polls rated Sen. John Kerry the favorite.'

https://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/27/mgrind.hot.primary/

[flotsam]

3. Well, there's this:

"New Hampshire law allows towns with fewer than 100 residents to open the polls at midnight and close them as soon as all registered voters have cast their ballots.[13] Hart's Location is one of the New Hampshire communities where the first votes are cast in the Democratic and Republican New Hampshire primaries, the first presidential primaries in the United States during each presidential election year. The Hart's Location midnight voting tradition, which began in 1948, actually predates the more widely known Dixville Notch practice; however, Dixville Notch generally receives greater publicity.

The community's voting tradition received a nod in the 2002 third-season episode of US television program The West Wing, in an episode entitled "Hartsfield's Landing", named after a town clearly modeled on either Hart's Location, or its companion, Dixville Notch."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart%27s_Location,_New_Hampshire

Crawford Notch is one of my favorite places and the whole wiki listing is worth a read.