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Posted: January 8, 2008 11:19 AM
With 46 Votes In, McCain, Obama Jump to Early 'Leads'
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As the clock struck midnight, the quadrennial event that is the New Hampshire primary kicked off as it always does, in the tiny hamlets of Dixville Notch and Hart’s Location.

New Hampshire has a rule on the books that allows unincorporated towns of fewer than 100 to open their polls at midnight and close them again once the voting is complete. And so the voters of Dixville Notch, and its lesser-known brethren, Hart’s Location, show up at midnight to cast their ballots.

The Manchester Union-Leader had an article outlining a bit of the scene in the tiny ski resort town as the big ballot moment approached.

“At 10:45 p.m., Republican presidential candidate Duncan Hunter arrived. Just before 11:30 p.m., Mitt Romney’s son, Craig, showed up, with little fanfare,” Lorna Colquhoun wrote in the paper. “There was some buzz around the ballroom that Bill Richardson would come, but it turned out his plane was unable to land at the Berlin Municipal Airport in Milan.”

Hunter, the long-shot Republican congressman, hailed the vote in the two tiny towns as democracy in action.

”It epitomizes people-to-people politicking,” the Associated Press reported Hunter as saying minutes before the votes were cast (apparently person-to-person failed to work for Hunter as he received no votes in either town).

In the end, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain scored victories in the two early votes — In Dixville Notch, Obama got 7 votes, Edwards 2 and Bill Richardson 1. Among Republicans, McCain got 4 votes, Romney 2 and Rudy Giuliani 1.

In nearby Hart’s Location, Obama received 9 votes, Hillary Rodham Clinton 3 and John Edwards 1. On the Republican side, McCain received 6 votes, Mike Huckabee 5, Ron Paul 4 and Mitt Romney 1.

Of course it best be kept in mind that New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner expects half a million people to cast ballots in the New Hampshire primary, or 60 percent of all registered voters.

But Dixville Notch and Hart’s Location did garner their fair share of the media spotlight for their moment.

The Boston Globe produced a whole video report on The Legend of Dixville Notch…

And then there were the kill-joy analysts who pointed out, quite accurately, that historically the towns have been way off in predicting the outcome.

“So … we’ll hear about the winner of Dixville Notch, something like 12 votes to 10. And that will be nice, but all that will get the winner is 12 votes…,” wrote Jim Geraghty in the National Review Online.

Sounds like someone has not embraced the spirit and the spectacle of Dixville Notch…

In the interest of full disclosure, we apparently wrote this same story in 2000. Curious what happened then?