One of the first communities in the nation to reveal its election results voted unanimously for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden early Tuesday, marking only the second time a candidate has swept the tiny New Hampshire hamlet in its 60-year tradition of midnight voting.
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All five voters in Dixville Notch, about 20 miles south of the Canadian border, gathered at the now-closed Balsams Resort to become some of the first people in the country to formally submit their decisions. The residents drop paper ballots into a wooden box, and the votes are counted by hand.
The only other time the community’s voters have been in agreement was when all nine chose Republican Richard Nixon over Democrat John F. Kennedy in 1960, the tradition’s first year.
On Monday, a video of one Dixville Notch resident
explaining his vote for Biden attracted widespread attention. Les Otten described himself as a lifelong Republican who, despite disagreeing with Biden on many issues, felt that a vote for him was a vote for national unity.
“My vote today is meant to send a message to my fellow Republicans that our party can find its way back,” Otten said. “It’s time to return to the values the conservative party has held historically dear.”
Otten then became the first Dixville Notch voter to cast his ballot.
Two New Hampshire towns are fighting for the prestige of the ‘midnight vote’
The 2020 results were
a shift from 2016, when four Dixville Notch voters chose Democrat Hillary Clinton, two voted for now-President Trump, a Republican, and one selected Libertarian Gary Johnson. An eighth person wrote in the name of now-Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah), the 2012 Republican presidential nominee.
Watching the results in Dixville Notch is a hobby for some political observers, although there’s no correlation between the outcome there and the final tally of the presidential race. While the hamlet was once
a destination for presidential candidates, the visits have slowed to a trickle since the Balsams closed in 2011 and the local population declined with it.
Neither Biden nor Trump earned any of the community’s five votes in
this year’s primaries. Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg (D) took home three write-in votes, one of which was cast in the Republican primary. Former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) won one vote each.
Dixville Notch’s midnight-voting tradition almost had to pause this year because of a lack of registered voters,
WMUR reported. The community had only four of five necessary voters until Otten, who is redeveloping the Balsams Resort, moved to town in January and registered to vote.
Most presidential election nights in Dixville Notch involve big food spreads and reporters crowded into the resort to watch voting, but the
coronavirus pandemic disrupted that plan this year, town moderator Tom Tillotson
told the Associated Press. He said the hamlet also would not be able to celebrate 60 years of midnight voting.
Two other New Hampshire towns usually cast their ballots around midnight. In Millsfield, voters chose Trump this year by a margin of 16 to five. Hart’s Location suspended its tradition because of the coronavirus.