N.H. towns vie for late-night voter limelight
A remote pass in the White Mountains, deep in the Great North Woods, tiny Dixville Notch, N.H., is steeped in New England folklore and political tradition. Every four years, every registered voter in town treks to the polling place at midnight to cast the first ballots in the nation's first primary and presidential election, drawing worldwide attention to the little hamlet, population 74.
The quirky, quaint practice, a symbol of democracy in its purest form, resumes late tonight at a local resort hotel, The Balsams, as it has every presidential election year since the town became a voting community in 1960.
For decades, Dixville Notch had the spotlight all to itself, its first-in-the-nation status undisputed, its election results instantly beamed across the county as a potential bellwether.
But in 1996 Hart's Location, an even smaller mountain hamlet about 80 miles to the south, joined Dixville Notch in voting in Election Day's earliest moments. While Dixville Notch is better known, the two towns have since waged a friendly battle for the midnight media attention and campaign stops, plus the bragging rights that come with it. It is a point of local pride that has put both small towns on the national map and highlights New Hampshire's unique brand of town-meeting-style, shoe-leather presidential campaigning.
As it turns out, residents of Hart's Location had voted just after the clock struck 12 as far back as 1948, claiming "Hart's Location: First in the Nation!" more than a decade before Dixville Notch even existed. But after 1964, residents of Hart's Location decided to stay in bed and vote in the morning like the rest of the country, leaving Dixville Notch alone in the late-night limelight.
To hear some say it, it was a bit of trickery, a single clock turned forward just a few minutes, that allowed the new Dixville Notchers to wrest the coveted first-voting status from their rivals, and propelled the town to political glory.
"If that clock hadn't gone ahead, there'd be no Dixville today," said Dan Wolf, 60, a former United Press International photographer who has covered the Dixville vote for 30 years. "It's the folklore of how Dixville Notch came to be."
According to Wolf, Neil Tillotson, the owner of The Balsams who died in 2001 at 102, had convinced the town's voters, all nine of them, to cast their ballots at midnight. While most of the media gathered at Hart's Location, as was the custom, a United Press International photographer planted himself in the Balsams ballroom.
Somehow, with the photographer angling for a scoop, Tillotson for publicity, midnight came just a bit earlier in Dixville Notch than it did in Hart's Location. With the headstart, the Balsams photos made it onto the news wire a few minutes before the competition, and four years later Dixville Notch had effectively usurped Hart's Location's throne.
"Those were the days when two to three minutes in front of the other guy was critical," Wolf said. "If you could get your picture to the Times of London before the competition, they would immediately print it. And if you have a front-page story in The
The not-quite-midnight tale, tall or not, has quietly circulated in New Hampshire for years, mostly among reporters and photographers who chronicled the 1960 Dixville vote. But the details have remained hazy or contradictory, and media allusions to Dixville Notch's publicity coup are rare.
An Associated Press obituary stated that Tillotson "decided to steal some of the spotlight from Hart's Location," and a 1988 UPI article reported that Dixville Notch residents agreed to vote at midnight "at the urging of a wire service photographer intent on scooping his competitors."
"No one has ever talked about it openly, but there has always been a wink and a nod," Wolf said. "It's one of those wonderful chuckles, how a few minutes put Dixville on the map and made Hart's Location fall by the wayside."
Marion Varney, the town clerk in Hart's Location since 1979, has heard the clock story for years, and said she has few doubts about it. But she said Hart's was happy to trade the honor for a good night's sleep.
"It got to the point where people were tired of staying up," Varney said. "So Dixville jumped right in and really took it over. It never bothered us."
Hart's Location began opening the polls at night in the late '40s to let residents who worked for the railroad vote before their early shift, she said.
Kath Harris, assistant innkeeper at The Notchland Inn in Hart's Location, said residents used to complain they couldn't go to the outhouse without being stopped for an interview.
Reclaiming the tradition, she said, was not about one-upmanship, but community spirit and civic responsibility.
"Plus, we have cake," she said.
But Michael Pearson, a former selectman in Dixville Notch, noted pointedly that C-SPAN, the preeminent network for political junkies, typically covers the Dixville proceedings. That won't soon change, he predicted.
As for the clock story, he said that while Tillotson was known for scheduling the vote "by his own timepiece," he believed Dixville Notch gained the upper hand because of the hotel's superior communications and amenities, not time-tinkering.
Varney acknowledged that proponents of midnight voting wanted to see the town recapture the spotlight, and released a statement reminding one and all that the small hamlet once "echoed every four years with the motto, 'Hart's Location: First in the Nation!' "
But she, for one, doesn't see what all the fuss is about.
"Some people like the idea of all the exposure," she said. "I don't really care."
Bill Greene of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Peter Schworm can be reached at schworm@globe.com 