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After a seemingly endless presidential campaign, voters in the United States are going to the polls to decide whether to give president Barack Obama a second term or replace him with his Republican challenger, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
Voters in dozens of states were lined up before dawn, with lengthy lines and hour-long waits reported in many places. In New York and New Jersey, eastern states battered last week by Hurricane Sandy, voters queued outside of tents and other makeshift polling places.
Romney voted on Tuesday morning near his home in Belmont, Massachusetts. From there he planned to hit the campaign trail, a rarity for presidential candidates on Election Day; his campaign has scheduled events in Pennsylvania and the battleground state of Ohio.
Obama voted more than a week ago in his hometown of Chicago, part of a campaign to encourage his supporters to take advantage of early voting. Some 30 million Americans have already voted, a record number.
The president plans to spend the day at his headquarters in the city, and has no plans to hit the campaign trail.
His vice president, Joe Biden, cast his ballot in the early morning hours in his home state of Delaware. He will travel to Chicago in the afternoon to watch the results with Obama.
Tuesday's vote caps off a grueling campaign that became the most expensive in history: Candidates and outside groups spent some $2.6bn on the presidential race alone.
Both candidates have spent the last few weeks barnstorming the handful of "swing states" which will decide the election. Obama made campaign stops on Monday in Wisconsin, Iowa and Ohio, while Romney visited New Hampshire, Florida, Ohio and Virginia.
Obama used his final campaign stop to remind voters of his accomplishments: the economy's slow recovery from recession, the rescue of the American auto industry, and the end of the war in Iraq, among other things.
He sought to sharpen the contrast between his policies and those of his opponent.
"It's not just a choice between two candidates and two parties, it's a choice between two different visions for America," he said.
Obama has not laid out a detailed agenda for his second term, and Romney has seized on that in his final speeches, warning voters that the president will simply repeat his policies from the past four years - which the Republican nominee described as a failure.
"His plan for the next four years is to take all the ideas from the first term - the stimulus, the borrowing, Obamacare, all the rest - and do them over again," Romney said, referring to the president's $787bn economic stimulus package and his health care reforms.
"He calls that 'Forward.' I call it 'Forewarned,'" the former governor quipped.
Polls positive for Obama
The last round of national polls heading into the vote were good news for the president. A Pew Research Center poll showed him leading Romney by three points, 48 per cent to 45 per cent. The same poll had them tied last week.
Two other polls showed a closer race: A Washington Post-ABC News poll had Obama leading by one point, 49 per cent to 48 per cent; and a CNN poll had the candidates tied with 49 per cent of the vote.
All three of those results were within the polls' margins of error.
But the popular vote will not decide the outcome. States are apportioned a number of electoral votes based on their population, and the candidate who wins a majority - 270 - becomes president. And the final state polls showed the president leading in most of the crucial swing states.
Surveys in Ohio have had Obama leading by anywhere from three to five points. A victory there would mean Romney would have to win at least six of the remaining eight battleground states, which seems unlikely: Obama led every poll conducted in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, Virginia and Wisconsin; Romney's lone bright spot was North Carolina, where he looks poised to win by a narrow margin.
The other two battlegrounds, Colorado and Florida, seem too close to predict, with polls showing a range of possible outcomes.
In Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, a small village which traditionally opens its polling places just after midnight - the first vote in the nation - Romney and Obama tied, 5-5. It was the first tie in more than 50 years of midnight voting in the town, which is not a bellwether for the national result.
The entire House of Representatives, the lower house of Congress, is also up for election, as is one-third of the Senate, the upper house.
Republicans are generally expected to keep control of the House, though polls show them losing some of their 50-seat majority. Democrats control the Senate by the narrowest of margins: They hold 51 seats in the 100-member body. Polls show them maintaining that majority, and perhaps picking up one or two extra seats.
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Daily Trust
Obama has won it already.
We still thank God the Black Man won.All praise be to Jah
It wasn't really tight.Obama won widely
Barack Obama is a great African man