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In Dixville Notch, N.H., 378 miles north and a world away from Co-op City, a very different scene will unfold on Tuesday. Since its institution in 1960, the polling place for this unincorporated township in New Hampshire's White Mountains has processed between eight and 30 votes each election.

Hours before voters in most of the nation's precincts are even thinking of getting out of bed, Dixville Notch's voting-age population of 11 Republicans, two Democrats and 13 independents lines up at the Balsams resort, where a special room is permanently set aside for elections.

Dixville Notch takes advantage of a New Hampshire law that allows voting to begin at midnight on Election Day, and at 12:01 a.m. the voters proceed to their voting booths - each citizen has his or her own - marks a ballot and drops it in the ballot box.

Dixville Notch moderator Thomas Tillotson, who runs the township's elections, closes the polls and counts the votes, and by about 12:15 a.m. Dixville Notch has made its choice, typically announced prominently on late-night TV news as the first local returns in the nation.

"We don't have very many people," Tillotson said. "It only takes a few minutes."

The Dixville Notch polls originated with Tillotson's father Neil, who owned the Balsams and in 1960 persuaded the state legislature to authorize an election in the remote resort region near the Canadian border. The elder Tillotson presided over Dixville Notch's elections until his death in 2001. This year, his son will take over the job.

Although most of the township's citizens are independent voters, they tend to swing Republican, and Dixville Notch helped in its own small way to send George W. Bush to the White House in 2000: It gave him 21 votes, Democrat Al Gore five and Green Party nominee Ralph Nader one.

Despite the Norman Rockwell-esque simplicity of the Dixville Notch election, federal election laws still wrap red tape around the township's voting operation.

Tillotson finds himself worrying about complying with laws such as the Motor Voter Act, which was written with places like Co-op City in mind, not northern New Hampshire. The Motor Voter Act requires that people must be able to register to vote when they receive or renew their driver's licenses.

"All the concerns about voting in highly populated states, where they write rules and regulations, they don't exempt the little places," Tillotson said. "So we have to do more paperwork and pay attention to a lot more things than we used to."