New Hampshire law allows towns with fewer than 100 residents to open the polls at midnight and close them as soon as all registered voters have cast their ballots.[11] Hart's Location is, along with Dixville Notch, one of two New Hampshire communities where the first votes are cast in the Democratic and Republican New Hampshire primaries, the first presidential primaries in the United States during each presidential election year. The Hart's Location midnight voting tradition, which began in 1948, actually predates the more widely-known Dixville Notch practice; however, Dixville Notch generally receives greater publicity because Hart's Location discontinued the practice in 1964,[1] only to reinstate it in 1996.
The community's voting tradition received a nod in the 2002 third season episode of US television program The West Wing, in an episode entitled "Hartsfield's Landing", named after a town clearly modeled on either Hart's Location, or its companion, Dixville Notch.