In Dixville Notch, a Tie Between the Two Candidates

The 10 voters in the small town of Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, tucked away in the northeast of the United States, symbolically launched the 2012 U.S. election by voting in the night from Monday to Tuesday, but have been unable to determine a majority for the first time in the town’s history.

It has been a tradition since 1960. The people of Dixville Notch have been the first voters to cast their ballot in each U.S. election cycle. It has been a trademark for this isolated town whose slogan is, as a result, “First in the Nation.” Without breaking that tradition, the voters there have accomplished their civic duty in the middle of the night in front of the cameras from all around the United States and the world.

After only a minute after the opening of the polls, the counting began. The verdict: five votes to Barack Obama and five to Mitt Romney. “This has never happened before here; we have a tie,” pronounced the registrar as he read the results.

Uncertainty

At midnight, local time, Tanner Tillotson, the first of the 300 million Americans called to the polls to vote, cast his ballot in the usual wooden box used every year. “I voted for Barack Obama,” declared the 24-year-old sailor.

Republican candidates had always received the majority of votes in Dixville Notch, except in 2008, when Barack Obama was victorious here. In fact, on Monday night, Mitt Romney held his last speech of the day in Manchester, a town in the same state of New Hampshire located more to the south. Who will the population of New Hampshire decide on Tuesday night? Nobody dares to offer a guess. “My feeling is that it will take a very, very long time to find the name of our next president,” says a local police officer, who came to take part in the “occasion.”

Although he wished to remain anonymous, the police officer was quite loquacious. “This part of New Hampshire had a lot of trouble during the recession,” he said before counting the number of nearby factories that had closed — a furniture factory over here, a paper mill over there. He estimated that “around 800 jobs have been lost in nearly three years.”

Tanner Tillotson thinks that “people here would like the recovery to go more quickly, but without Barack Obama’s action, the country would have been in an even worse state,” as he remains unsure of the name of the next president of the United States.