(Headline USA) An elite cabal of six registered voters in an exclusive New Hampshire resort town catapulted GOP dark horse Nikki Haley into an early lead during a midnight vote ahead of Tuesday’s first-in-the-nation primary.
The residents of tiny Dixville Notch all cast their ballots for Haley, giving her a clean sweep over former President Donald Trump and all the other candidates who have since dropped out, with many of them endorsing the former president and several joining him on the campaign trail.
Because Iowa’s caucuses do not actually involve casting ballots, the New Hampshire hamlet—which caters to snowmobilers and Nordic skiers in the winter, and golfers and hikers in the summer—was the first place in the nation to vote in the 2024 primaries.
With such a tiny sample of voters, the results are not typically indicative of how an election will end up. But they do provide for an early curiosity.
Like the Swiss ski resort of Davos—notorious for its annual globalist summit each January, where business and political leaders meet to discuss world domination—Dixville Notch is now synonymous for many U.S. politicos with its quadrennial midnight-voting ceremony, which dates back to the 1960s.
It voted against the eventual nominee Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, opting, respectively, for John Kasich and megabillionaire Michael Bloomberg—a far-left Democratic candidate at the time, who was a write-in for Dixville Notch’s GOP nominating contest in 2020.
For the 2024 primary, the town had four registered Republicans and two undeclared voters, with the results announced just a few minutes after midnight.
The voters were outnumbered more than 10-to-1 by reporters from every corner of the globe—not to mention by a pile of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and an 11-month-old golden retriever named Maxine greeting media and voters.
In some previous elections, a couple of other tiny New Hampshire towns have also voted at midnight, but this year Dixville Notch went it alone.
The voting took place in a new location, the living room of Tillotson House, with the Balsams Resort undergoing renovations.
Les Otten, the principal owner and developer of the Balsams Resort, said he was excited to cast his ballot for Haley, who has been slammed as a neocon warmonger bought and sold by the military–industrial complex.
Nikki’s Haley was previously a well paid board member to Boeing, the company that makes the F-15 and profits handsomely from foreign weapon sales to foreign countries and forever wars. https://t.co/2o7SJ7piPU
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) August 24, 2023
“It’s special. It really is,” Otten said.
“It’s what ought to happen in every community in the United States, where there is 100% participation, everybody votes,” he continued. “None of the six of us can complain about the outcome of the election, because we’ve participated.”
The residents of Dixville Notch used a paper-ballot system involving a fully transparent hand count of the final tally, something that election-integrity advocates have pushed for since the 2020 debacle, when several other states’ wee-hours ballot tabulations produced highly suspicious results in the Nov. 3 general election.
Some have voiced concern that New Hampshire’s aging equipment could lead to possible breakdowns and delays on Tuesday, potentially delivering an upset for Haley at a critical moment as Trump appears to be on the verge of gaining the momentum needed to clinch the nomination in historic fashion.
On the Democrat side, suspicions were raised after a robocall went out to voters with Joe Biden’s voice telling them not to vote on Tuesday. While some claimed it was generated by artificial intelligence, it may well be a false-flag operation by the Biden campaign or his supporters, since the president is not actually on the ballot.
The Democratic National Committee fought with New Hampshire after fearing that Biden could face an embarassing loss to one of his lesser-known competitors there, and ultimately decided to begin its formal election season with the more politically favorable South Carolina.
New Hampshire Democrats are attempting, however, to organize a write-in campaign for the incumbent president, despite his having written them off.
Otten said he didn’t agree with those saying the New Hampshire primary had fallen flat this year, with President Joe Biden not on the ballot and Republican contender Ron DeSantis withdrawing at the last minute.
“It always does boil down to just a couple of people at the end of the day,” Otten said. “We’ve got two viable candidates on the Republican side.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
