> One thing I've never understood about the intricacies of US elections. In primaries and so on, New Hampshire always gets their vote tallied up first.

New Hampshire gets the first Primary, but they're on equal footing with the rest of the EST time zone as far as the election itself goes. New Hampshire was close this year, so which way the state went wasn't called until quite some time after the polls closed.

> Why? Yesterday morning, I woke up at 5:30 am and the radio mentioned "... early results from [name of NH town that my sleep-fogged brain didn't catch] which traditionally casts first vote: 38 Gore, 14 Bush, and 1 for Nader."

Dixville Notch. It's not a special privilege of that town; it's just a tradition that their polls open at one minute after midnight; they are, consequently, the first to cast their ballots. I don't know where that tally is coming from, though. The report I read was that the early Dixville Notch voters went in favor of Bush, 21 to 5.

I'm also not sure where you hear that Gore is in the lead in the Florida recount. I can't find that anywhere -- but that's also a relatively meaningless factoid without taking into account what those same tallied regions reported for numbers the first time.