Will New Hampshire advance as Dixville Notch advances?
That's what former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley will be hoping after a small village near the Canadian border continues a 50-year tradition of late-night voting early Tuesday morning.
All six voters in the district — four registered Republicans and two undocumented voters — pulled the lever on Haley, 52. Haley is hoping for a shock victory in the Granite State, which many observers see as former President Donald Trump's unstoppable march. Republican nomination.
President Trump, on the other hand, will be hoping that recent elementary history repeats itself.
Dixville Notch hasn't predicted the outcome of the Republican New Hampshire primary since 2008, when he was a senator at the time. John McCain of Arizona won the district election, primary, and ultimately the Republican nomination.
Before 2008, the last time Dixville Notch predicted the outcome of a Republican primary was in 1992, when then-President George W. Bush won 9 of the 14 Republican votes, defeating Pat Buchanan. rejected the challenge.
In 2016, Trump narrowly lost the Dixville Notch election to Ohio Governor John Kasich by a 3-2 margin, but won the Buckeye stater by a 19 percentage point margin in the primary. did.
Late-night voting in Dixville Notch began in the 1960 general election, the brainchild of Neil Tillotson, owner of nearby Balsam's Resort.
At the polls that night, Republican Richard Nixon won all nine votes over Democrat John F. Kennedy, resulting in a landslide victory.
Balsam's closed in 2011, but the tradition of late-night voting continues, with a festival held Tuesday at Tillotson's old home.
Dixville Notch is one of three locations in New Hampshire where late-night voting is allowed, but the other two locations will not participate in that tradition in this primary.
In the town of Hart's Location, nestled in the White Mountains and a two-hour drive south of Dixville Notch, moderator Les Schauf supports keeping more normal voting hours from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and decided to stop voting late at night.
Schuch cited a number of factors in his decision, according to a statement posted on the town's website. Among them: If President Biden is absent from the Democratic ballot, additional time will likely be needed to count the dozens of write-in votes, and that towns will have to do more to count votes and verify voter rolls. These included the fact that there was a lack of supportive supervisors.
Officials at Hart's Location began late-night voting in 1952 to give local railroad workers more access to polling places, abandoned the practice 12 years later, and resumed it in 1996. It left open the possibility of reinstating late-night voting in this year's popular vote. The election is November 5th.
Another place that allows late-night voting, Dixville Notch's neighboring town of Millsfield, chose not to do so out of consideration for residents who don't need to set alarms to vote.
“There's going to be more absentee ballots than people actually counting votes there,” said Town Selectman Sean Cote. he told New Hampshire Public Radio last month..
“The three of us were going to come count the absentee ballots and maybe vote in groups.”
