Genevieve Nadig, Meet the Mother of New Hampshire's Midnight Voting Tradition

A personal cartoon given to Genevieve by

Clifford K. Berryman of The Washington Star.

CREDIT COURTESY OF THE NADIG FAMILY ARCHIVE

If you follow New Hampshire politics, you’re probably familiar with the ritual of the midnight vote, where a handful of tiny, mostly rural towns stay up late to cast their ballots as soon as election day dawns.

And you would be forgiven for thinking all the credit for this tradition goes to Neil Tillotson, the bespectacled businessman who was so well known as the face of Dixville Notch’s nocturnal vote that he’s honored with his very own bobblehead at the New Hampshire Historical Society gift shop, complete with a ballot box and all.

But New Hampshire’s midnight voting tradition didn’t actually start in Dixville — or with Tillotson. Instead, according to the earliest public record we could find, it started a few miles away, and a few decades earlier, with a 27-year-old woman named Genevieve Nadig.

She was a faithful Republican who delighted in meeting Presidents Nixon and Reagan. Clifford K. Berryman, a famous political cartoonist for The Washington Evening Star, was so enamored after visiting Genevieve he sent her a personalized drawing depicting two stuffed pillows he picked up from her roadside gift shop. That piece still hangs on Rick’s wall today.

“Everybody loved Genevieve,” Rick says. “Everybody.”

Up until the week she died in 1985, Rick says his aunt was still skipping around, vibrant as ever — probably because a tourist just stopped by her shop with a $100 bill.

Attribution: Casey McDermott, nhpr.org
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