DIXVILLE NOTCH, N.H. — It was 20 minutes to midnight, and I was standing just outside a living room that was crammed with reporters from 27 media outlets who were jostling for position as they prepared to watch five people vote.
It was already a weird night, this tradition that is the midnight vote in Dixville Notch, and it got even weirder when I realized I was standing next to the man who would be the first of those five voters to cast a ballot.
“Are you having any second thoughts about who you’re voting for?” I whispered to Les Otten, the man who saved this strange tradition, thinking I was making small talk.
But his face immediately took on a sort of gravity. And as he took me on a meandering history of the issues that have influenced his votes through the decades, going all the way back to the Vietnam War, it became clear just how fraught the tiny quadrennial circus in Dixville Notch really is.
Otten was about to become the first person to vote for president in the first primary in the nation.
“I wouldn’t describe all this as fun,” he said. “What I fear most is being shoeboxed into giving a 10-second sound bite explaining why I voted the way I did.”
Which is precisely what was going to happen as soon as the votes were read.
“It’s an obligation,” he said — one he inherited when he purchased a shuttered resort called The Balsams.
Back in 1960, a man named Neil Tillotson, who had invented the latex balloon, bought the resort and arranged to host a midnight vote for the tiny population of people who lived in the hamlet. His stunt quickly became a part of American political lore — a warm slice of Americana, born before the divide between political parties was quite so seismic. Ever since, the world’s media has made the trek to this community in far northern New Hampshire every four years to report breathlessly on these early votes, looking for a would-be bellwether to fill the morning’s news.
Even after Hart’s Location, a small town in the White Mountains, instituted its own midnight voting in 1996 — followed by Millsfield, which went nocturnal in 2016 — the media still gave the Balsams the pride of place.
But the tradition had certainly been slipping since the death of Tillotson in 2001. His son Tom took over, but after the Balsams closed in 2011, the vote lost its traditional location. And with the Balsams closed, the population in the area went into decline, until it hit just four: Tom Tillotson; his wife, Deborah; their son, Tanner; and a man named Joe Casey. The state requires five to fill the necessary roles required to run a polling place.
Just over a month ago, Otten, a developer who is planning to reopen the Balsams, came to the rescue by moving his official residence from Maine to the very house in which we were all standing. It was the summer home of the original owner of the Balsams, then became a culinary school during the time the Tillotsons owned the resort, and now looks like it could be the setting for a nice murder mystery. It is in the middle of nowhere, about 15 minutes from the town of Colebrook, and can only be reached by slipping and sliding down a snow-packed road surrounded by mountains. It was the only lit up thing for miles around.
For hours, the house had been stuffed with media, doing its best version of hurry up and wait. There was cake and coffee. There were political photos on the walls of the many, many candidates who have trekked to Dixville Notch through the years. And there was a lot of silence as everyone waited for midnight and the official kickoff of this circus.
The state requires seven officials to run an election, Tom Tillotson said, and they had worked out a carefully choreographed game of musical chairs, approved by the attorney general’s office, that would allow those positions to be filled by five people, which meant taking turns voting and checking one another in.
The rotating moved quickly, and by 12:06 the votes were all in and were then read aloud. In a surprise to the TV reporters who were loudly narrating the entire event just inches from the participants, former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg took an early lead, with three write-in votes, including from Otten, the lone Republican voter. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg split the remaining two votes.
Otten was immediately surrounded by reporters looking for 10-second soundbites on why he voted for Bloomberg.
As the house cleared out, Tom Tillotson looked relieved. He said this is the only way he’s ever voted, and he had been genuinely worried that Dixville Notch was going to become a footnote in history. “It would have been very sad if we hadn’t been able to pull this off,” he said.
And with that the media loaded up its cars and headed back down the snow-packed road, toward the chaos that awaited. After all this time, the presidential election had actually, finally begun.
Billy Baker can be reached at billy.baker@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram @billy_baker.