New Hampshire

A tiny New Hampshire community whose tradition of being among the first to cast ballots for president in primaries and the general election was endangered now has enough people to go ahead, the town moderator said Thursday.”We’re all a go,” said Tom Tillotson, of Dixville Notch. Dixville Notch has been in the spotlight for nearly 60 years for casting votes just after midnight in the first presidential primary and in November general elections. But last year, the attorney general’s office said the community was missing an official who is needed to hold an election come the Feb. 11 primary. The person who held that position had moved away. That left Dixville Notch with just four residents — Tillotson, his wife, his son and another person. If the community couldn’t find a fifth person in time to fill a selectman vacancy, it would have needed to contact the secretary of state’s office for assistance in joining nearby municipalities in order to vote. Resident No. 5 is Les Otten, developer of the Balsams resort, where the voting tradition began. Otten said he plans to move to Dixville Notch from Greenwood, Maine, ahead of the primary. He already owns several properties in the New Hampshire community and is working on a $186 million redevelopment project in the area.

A tiny, isolated community near the Canadian border known for casting ballots just after the stroke of midnight in presidential elections may need to forfeit that tradition in 2020. Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, has been in the spotlight for years for voting first in the state’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary and in November general elections. But the attorney general’s office recently said the community is currently missing a required official in order to hold an election come the Feb. 11 primary. Dixville Notch has shared midnight voting with two other places. One is Hart’s Location, a small town in the White Mountains that started the early voting tradition in 1948 to accommodate railroad workers who had to be at work before normal voting hours. Hart’s Location suspended the midnight voting in 1964 and brought it back in 1996. The town of Millsfield, 12 miles (20 kilometers) south of Dixville Notch, had midnight voting as far back as 1952, but stopped after a while. It decided to revive the early voting in 2016. Dixville drew notice after Neil Tillotson, who bought a resort called the Balsams, arranged for early voting at the hotel beginning in 1960. Tillotson, who ran a rubber factory and is credited with inventing the latex balloon, died in 2001 at age 102.

Once every four years, for a brief moment, it seems the whole world turns its eyes to Dixville Notch. Since 1960, voters in this tiny Coos County community have been casting their ballots just after the stroke of midnight to mark the official start of the New Hampshire presidential primary. Of course, Dixville Notch isn’t the only place in New Hampshire that opens its polls at midnight. But it’s kept its tradition running the longest, so it gets most of the press coverage. But Dixville Notch has lately found itself under a different kind of spotlight: from the New Hampshire attorney general’s office.

While much of the focus has been on young voters, New Hampshire lawmakers also are considering changes to make it easier for older residents to cast their ballots. The House Election Law Committee will hold public hearings Tuesday on two bills related to older voters. One would allow unrelated caregivers to deliver absentee ballots on behalf of voters who live in nursing homes or assisted living facilities. The other would allow anyone age 60 or older to vote up to five weeks before an election. Rep. Richard Komi, a Democrat from Manchester, is the sponsor of the second bill, which he said is partly inspired by his 75-year-old mother. He wants to help elderly residents who are in poor health or who worry about inclement weather to vote when it is most convenient for them.

The voter registration law known as Senate Bill 3 will stay in place through the upcoming midterms, after the New Hampshire Supreme Court on Friday overruled a lower court’s order that would have put the law on hold. The decision from the high court capped off a rollercoaster week for election officials in New Hampshire. On Monday, Hillsborough County Superior Court Judge Kenneth Brown ordered them to stop using Senate Bill 3 (or “SB3”) in the upcoming midterms. By Wednesday, the state said, essentially, “Not so fast.” Arguing that it was too late to make any substantial changes to the registration process and that Brown’s instructions would burden pollworkers, state election officials asked both Brown and the New Hampshire Supreme Court for permission to keep the law in place. (The opposing attorneys challenging SB3, meanwhile, called this “a thinly-veiled attempt to create a record of difficulty and confusion where there really is none” so the state could avoid compliance with Brown’s order.)