By Christopher Maag

DIXVILLE NOTCH, NH— The chocolate chip cookies were baked, the room was overheated, and one of America’s weirder election traditions was about to start: All six residents of a former hotel in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, gathering at midnight to cast their votes for president.

“This feels about normal,” Tom Tillotson, 79, whose father created the tradition of early morning voting at the Balsams Grand Resort Hotel in 1960, said a few minutes before the balloting started.

The tally — the first result of this election — was announced 12 minutes after midnight. In a hamlet where 66.67% of the registered voters are Republicans (the other two are independents) and where Nikki Haley swept the primary with all six votes, the general election ended in a tie: three votes for Kamala Harris, and three for Donald Trump.

“I didn’t see that coming,” Scott Maxwell said of the split result. His vote, for Trump, came as something of a surprise, even to him. As late as 10:30 p.m. Monday (4), Maxwell said he was undecided.

Four years ago, all five votes went to Joe Biden. In 2016, Hillary Clinton got four votes and Trump two.

Dixville Notch was created for the sole purpose of turning the Balsams resort into a voting location. Neil Tillotson, the hotel’s owner, won free advertising for the resort, and journalists took advantage of the in-house telephone company to deliver the town’s real, albeit statistically insignificant, vote tally 12 hours before exit polls from elsewhere in the country began to trickle in.

“It was a PR stunt all along,” said Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Centre and a co-author of “The First Primary,” a book about New Hampshire’s role in presidential elections.

In time, the event attracted hundreds of journalists, and presidential candidates including Ronald Reagan, John McCain and both George Bushes. As the stunt bloomed into a tradition, the Balsams resort atrophied. Visitor numbers and revenues declined until 2011 when the resort closed.

How do you vote in a town that was never a town, in a hotel that is no longer a hotel?

For the first few elections after 2011, voting continued inside the former hotel, but the empty, unheated buildings deteriorated quickly in New Hampshire’s harsh winters. In 2016 and 2020, voters and journalists crammed onto the porch of a small house on the property that was renovated for the event, said Coralie Stepanian, 59, an employee at the hotel.

Another crisis struck in 2019 when the number of employees living on the property dropped to four — one fewer than the minimum required by state law for an election district. By then, Les Otten, a former ski resort developer, had purchased the property, with plans to develop it into a year-round resort.

To save the midnight voting tradition, Otten renovated a boarded-up home on the property and then moved in himself. Later, he was joined by his business partner, bringing the number of residents and voters to six.

“It’s just clean, plain democracy,” Otten, 75, said Monday of his desire to keep the event going.

The voters of Dixville Notch worked for weeks to prepare for this year’s election night. They took calls from curious journalists in New York City, Montreal and Hong Kong. They mowed the grass in front of Otten’s home, which now doubles as the voting precinct. In the kitchen, they prepared ham and cheese croissants and chocolate chip cookies as thick as wallets. In the living room, they erected risers for television journalists, chairs for photographers, and a plastic table for counting votes.

“In our backyard, the system is going to work the way it was designed,” Otten said before the votes were cast. “Six people will vote. Their votes will be counted. And once it’s done, it’s done.”

-New York Times