Dixville Notch Election Results: Obama, Romney Tie In Bellwether Town

The first election results came in early Tuesday with a tie between President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney in Dixville Notch in New Hampshire.

Dixville Notch is always one of two locations that cast the first votes of the presidential election, just after midnight on Election Day. This year’s voting resulted in five votes for each candidate.

Obama got a win there in 2008.

The other town that enjoys the pride of voting first on Election Day is Hart’s Location, also in New Hampshire. It clearly leaned left, with Obama winning 23 votes, Romney getting nine and Libertarian Gary Johnson securing one vote.

Voting began in the presidential election with polls showing President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney neck-and-neck in a race that will be decided in a handful of states.

Polling stations across the nation opened Tuesday morning with Obama and Romney locked in a dead heat. Real Clear Politics’ average of the presidential polls show that Obama has a very slight lead, 48.9 percent to 48.2 percent.

The economy and jobs are the chief concerns of the nation, with the U.S. facing a "fiscal cliff" at the end of the year and the unemployment rate at a relatively high 7.9 percent. Nevertheless, the economy has been slowly picking up.

Obama has said he knows the pace of the recovery has been slow, but is adamant that the country is on the right course and shouldn’t turn back now. He paints Romney as a businessman who is bringing nothing but the same kind of policies that got the nation into the economic mess it currently faces.

But Romney, who has spent decades as CEO of venture capital firm Bain Capital, a company he started, argues that he knows how jobs are created. The Republican said he can get America working again and balance its books. Romney argues that he is the one who knows what “real change looks like.”

In their final push before Election Day, Obama and Romney focused on places they know could give them an inroad to the 270 electoral votes needed to secure the White House.

Obama stumped in Wisconsin, Ohio and Iowa, all Midwestern swing states, while Romney appeared in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and New Hampshire – some must-win states for him. No Republican has ever become president without winning Ohio.