WANZEY, N.H. - Voters bored by the well-worn issues of Campaign 2000 need look no further than Cheshire County, N.H., where the marketplace of ideas is still open for business.
Meet Susan Emerson, Republican candidate for state representative from District 13, a Texas oil executive whose trademark issue is a Texas-style Homestead Act. Running against her on the Democratic ticket is 76-year-old Arpad J. Toth, whose list of campaign issues includes the item ''Exorcisms.''
And rounding out the field from the Constitutional American party is Roy Kendel, now living and campaigning out of a 1988 Chrysler New Yorker, who advocates abolishing paper money and arming all men at adolescence.
While other campaigns seem awash in campaign contributions and spin doctors, the 325 races for New Hampshire's enormous legislature reflect the hurly-burly of citizen rule.
Running for New Hampshire's 400-member General Court, smart strategists - like Emerson - learn to press the flesh at town dumps, and underdogs - like Toth - worry when voters seem to be running over their campaign signs repeatedly with their cars.
With an annual salary of just $100 waiting at the finish line and the weighty issue of school funding increasing the workload, they are races that rely heavily on the force of enthusiasm.
''It's incredibly difficult to find candidates,'' said Peter Burling, the House Democratic leader. ''I mean, we may be exploring the edge of volunteer legislators.''
Most years, a quarter of the seats in New Hampshire's legislature are uncontested, so this year's figure, 75, is relatively low. The fourth-largest parliamentary body in the world still pays the country's lowest lawmaker salary, a rate that was set in 1889 and upheld by voters time after time since then. The result has been a high quotient of retirees - one former representative described the body as a ''den of antiquity'' - and the election of some legislators who might have had a slim chance in other states.
''That's why I'm running. What would that mean, if only lawyers could get [into the legislature]?'' said Kendel, who has also run for the presidency, the US House and Senate, and the New Hampshire governorship, according to the Keene Sentinel.
A case in point is Peter Leonard, who won a seat in 1996 as the representative from District 39 in Hillsborough County, announcing to his fellow legislators upon his arrival that he was ''now reading at a third-grade level, and ... [would] continue to do better.'' Leonard won that office on his seventh try, on a budget of $42, during a period when he had no phone and no car. The next year, the rights to his life story were purchased by 20th Century Fox after a screenwriter decided there ''couldn't be a more Hollywood type of story.''
And when it comes to small-town elections, New Hampshire has never deserved its reputation for political conservatism, said Fritz Wetherbee, a popular television and radio personality who hosted ''New Hampshire Crossing'' for years.
''Nobody cares what you do, as long as you don't track it into their house,'' Wetherbee said. A case in point is Fred and Alba Chase, who had hammer-and-sickles carved into their tombstones when they died, but were elected to town office in Washington time and again, he said. ''People didn't care if they were Communists,'' he said. ''They just thought they were a little nuts. They were well thought of in the community.''
In much of New Hampshire, however, it's often easier to find Republican candidates than Democratic ones, which explain's Toth's presence in the race. Toth, a retired Navy pilot who carries a variety of dental floss in his briefcase, said he was ''sort of nonplussed'' when a representative of the Democratic Party asked him to run for the office, explaining that no one else was available.
Although Toth has achieved a high profile through roughly 100 letters to editors that he has had published in local newspapers - many of them dialogues with a fictional foil named ''Mr. Dunn C. Head'' - his only real leadership experience has been organizing a free-thinkers' discussion group known as ''the Dissenters.'' His best-known political act, a flamboyant campaign to move Keene State University's baccalaureate ceremony off-campus, has won him a steady stream of hate mail.
Going into this election, he knows that his major political stands - such as removing the oath to God from the notary public licensing process, or requiring all Americans to watch state executions, or banning all weapons that do not require two people to operate them - may not have mass appeal.
But he suspects that somewhere in Swanzey, Rindge, Richmond, and Fitzwilliam, there are those who secretly sympathize.
''I'm urging people to go into the voting booth, and when they've closed the curtain, and they're all alone, to vote for me,'' said Toth, conspiratorially. ''Then, someday, they can tell their grandchildren they voted in the first atheist in the state of New Hampshire.''
To Emerson, a mother of six whose antitax stances lie closer to New Hampshire's conservative tradition, it's hard to know how to respond to positions such as Toth's. A third-generation Texan, she learned to shoot at the age of 5, and would like to see New Hampshire adopt some of the qualities she says make Texans freer - such as exempting senior citizens from paying taxes for schools, prohibiting the seizure of residents' houses by the IRS or financial institutions, and raising the speed limit.
She's never met Toth, but noted that since moving to New Hampshire she hasn't ''run into a lot of atheists.''
But even Toth looks like a pol by comparison with Kendel, a former theology student who travels up and down the ''Nation State of New Hampshire'' campaigning, and eats many of his evening meals at the Community Kitchen, a Keene soup kitchen. Kendel, who is running as a write-in candidate in several races this year, says the United Nations should be relocated to another country.
He also backs the widespread construction of rail lines across New Hampshire, predicting that train travel ''is going to come back faster than a flea jumps back on a dog.'' Twice, he said, he's had threats against his life, but he's also found a number of fellow travelers on his campaign trip - more so, he says, the farther north he goes.
After reading an interview with the three candidates last week in the Keene Sentinel, a fourth candidate, Matthew Sweeney, announced that he was entering the race just days before the election. ''Based on who is already on the ballot, I will be writing myself in,'' he announced in the Sentinel.
The crazy-quilt politics of this year's race is somewhat disorienting, said one voter, in a region that used to be so uniformly Republican that town officials were hard pressed to find a single Democrat to serve as a ballot clerk.
''I can't explain it,'' said Thomas Parker, 61, who's been a selectman in Fitzwilliam on and off since 1975. ''Maybe it's the radon in the water.''
