McCain, Obama Win First Ballots in Dixville Notch, N.H.

John McCain and Barack Obama won their parties’ early polling in the first-in-the-nation primary in New Hampshire Tuesday, though it was no indication of how the state’s votes would turn.

Nonetheless, the early excitement for poll watchers predicting the outcome of Tuesday’s primary was marked by pandemonium in the northern hamlet along New Hampshire’s Canadian border, where the number of media and spectators outnumbered residents by multiples.

The town has 17 voters — two Democrats, three Republicans and 12 independents. Turnout was 100 percent. Four votes were cast by absentee ballot despite the fact that each voter was given his or her own booth at the town’s single polling station.

The results were:

McCain with 4 votes, Mitt Romney with 2 votes, Rudy Giuliani with 1 vote. Those were the only Republican votes cast.

On the Democratic side, Obama won a landslide 7 votes compared with 2 for John Edwards, one for Bill Richardson and none for Hillary Clinton.

Dixville Notch may not be a great predictor of the winner of the New Hampshire primary, but it is great political theater. The folks who live there are overwhelmingly independent, slightly cantankerous and somewhat offbeat from the rest of the state. They take their roles as the first balloters very seriously.

Neil Tillotson Jr.’s dad started the tradition in 1960, after he ran into an Associated Press reporter who saw the humor in letting a small town “way up in the middle of nowhere be a part of the voting process.â€