SHANE CARPENTER PHOTOGRAPHY

Lesser-Knowns

New Hampshire is home to a number of unique political traditions. Among those traditions is the open primary, which allows any citizen with $1000 dollars to appear on the ballot alongside the incumbent President and his high-powered challengers. With platforms ranging from abolishing the IRS to pumping hydrogen economy to having no discernible platform at all, the lesser-known candidates, as they prefer to call themselves, used the country's biggest political stage to air their own beefs with Big Brother and to fight for their share of the angry electorate.

Official Headquarters of John Donald Rigazio, a businessman and presidential hopeful from Lyndon Larouche's hometown in eastern New Hampshire.
   
John Donald Rigazio
   
John Buchanan, left, with Dick Bosa, at Buchanan's campaign headquarters at the Manchester Ramada Inn in Manchester, NH. Buchanan, a freelance journalist from Miami, and Bosa, the former mayor of Berlin, N.H., were both running for President on the Republican ticket. The men decided to partner up and serve as each other's campaign managers as well. Bosa died of cancer later in 2004.
     
  
Dick Bosa
   
Candidate Robert Linnell sits for an interview in the lobby of the Lebanon, N.H. retirement home he lived in. His wife of 53 years was planning to vote for Howard Dean.
   
Robert Haines, a fundamentalist libertarian candidate whose campaign was interrupted by court hearings and stints in jail for unpaid parking tickets, with his children at a Manchester, N.H., campaign stop.
     
  
Michael Callis: stonemason, fiddler, candidate for President of the United States of America
   
Haines speaks with fellow candidate John Buchanan. A heated argument between the two men broke out just after this picture was taken.
   
Fern Penna, a presidential hopeful from upstate New York poses next to the presidential snapshot wall at a New Hampshire restaurant.
     
  
Bill Wyatt
   
Bill Wyatt donates his prized Richard Nixon bust to the New Hampshire political library.
   
Lesser-known candidate, Jim Taylor, had made a documentary about his prior run in the New Hampshire primary in 2000.
     
  
Jim Taylor
   
On the final night of the campaign, as the tiny hamlet of Dixville Notch prepared to vote just after midnight, Dick Bosa signals his displeasure at not being included on the poster, though he and his fellow candidates were on the official ballots.
   
Wesley Clark takes the stage in Dixville Notch just after midnight. He received the majority of votes in the state's first round of voting.
     
  
The front room of the New Hampshire Republican Party headquarters. The office eventually issued a restraining order against lesser-known candidate John Buchanan, who had been harassing them on the phone and in person to own up to the Bush family's alleged ties to the Nazis.