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"FacebookPinterestdixvillenotch1.490.jpg\n\nThere are days when it gets so lonely in the empty hotel that Jeff McIver plays a recording of a long ago charity ball to keep his spirits up. Occasionally, hearing a man's voice above the muffled hum, he'll poke his head out his office, thinking someone's there. But it's just a voice on the tape, telling the same garbled joke, hour after hour. McIver is alone in the New Hampshire winter, miles from the nearest town, sole inhabitant of a rambling Victorian resort nestled in a mountain pass that can see more than 20 feet of snow over the season.\n\n\"It starts getting dark early, you're here working late, and the wind's howling and the building's creaking,\" McIver told me as we sat in the deserted lobby in October, the hotel closed for the fall. \"It can really wear on you mentally by spring. And there are spirits that live here. If you let your imagination run wild, you won't come out of the office.\" McIver a soft-spoken man with a wisp of brown hair and a thick North Woods accent, is the general manager of the Balsams Grand Resort Hotel. He smiles as he talks about the folklore of the place. But he is serious about the ghosts.\n\nThe Balsams is haunted by eighty-three spirits, according to an expert on such things once summoned to investigate, and details of sightings fill a binder as thick as a phonebook. There are the friendly ones, like the blonde in the blue Gilded Age ball gown, seen recently standing by the grand piano in the John Dix Social Room. There are the scary ones, like the teenage girl who appeared at the foot of a guest's bed, dripping wet, on the anniversary of her death in Lake Gloriette. And then there are the ones who ran for office\u2014because after all, this is New Hampshire.\n\nSpecifically this is Dixville Notch, the tiny unincorporated hamlet that casts its 21 ballots at the stroke of midnight on Election Day (which is to say, tonight)\u2014giving its handful of citizens the distinction of being the very first to vote in the very first primary of the process. It is the New Hampshire of New Hampshire: first among first, remotest and quaintest among the remote and quaint.\n\n\"It starts getting busy around 11:00 or 11:30,\" McIver says of election eve, \"and we wait in the ballroom for all the residents to arrive.\" The whole trick of midnight voting, it turns out, is being able to certify to the State that everyone in the town has voted\u2014either in person or absentee\u2014making it lawful to close the polls before the rest of the state does. (Several years ago, McIver said, there was a touch-and-go situation with a 90-year-old voter who didn't like voting absentee, but had trouble making it to The Balsams, often through whirling snow, on his own. Neighbors would go fetch him in a van.)\n\nTonight, there will be 30 names on the ballot when the residents of Dixville Notch gather for the midnight vote\u2014nine more candidates than there are voters. McIver and company will file down the long corridor on the main floor and enter their inner sanctum, the Ballot Room. There, each will find an individual voting booth set up for him.\n\nThey will deliberate beneath the black-and-white photographs of candidates past, presidents and also-rans, statesmen and goofballs. And as if the wind-battered hotel didn't evoke The Shining enough, the two candidates who will likely finish first and second in the state this year are already represented in the photos on the wall: in one, a young, dark-eyebrowed Ron Paul poses with voters in front of the mantle in this very room, full of optimism for his 1988 Libertarian bid. Another, showing a man with a woman draped in his arms, is labeled thus: \"Former Michigan governor George Romney kicked off his 1968 bid for the Republican presidential nomination here in Dixville Notch. Here he is helping his wife onto a live symbol of the Republican party\u2014Popsicle, a 700-pound elephant.\"\n\n\"As soon as you vote and you walk out of the Ballot Room,\" McIver said, \"you'll have 20 mics thrown in your face, wondering who you voted for and why you voted for them, and it's broadcast all over the world. And you really feel like your vote really counts here. I tell you what, you really feel like it's a great country when you get to feeling that your vote really counts.\"\n\nFacebookPinterestdixvillenotch.ronpaul.490.jpg\n\n Yes, this is a young, dashing Ron Paul.\n\nFacebookPinterestdixvillenotch.ballotroom.490.jpg\n\n The sacred ballot room at the Balsams Grand Resort Hotel where where New Hampshire's first votes are cast.\n\nFacebookPinterestdixvillenotch.romney.490.jpg\n\n See? We totally didn't make up that photo of George Romney and the elephant."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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