November 05, 2008	Wednesday	Ziqa'ad 6, 1429

WASHINGTON, Nov 4: Americans crowded polling stations on Tuesday to vote in their historic election.

Amid predictions of record turnout, long queues snaked in the dark outside polling stations waiting to open in states like New York, Maryland, and hotly contested Virginia, with many expecting to stand for hours to vote.

Results were expected to start pouring in after the first polls closed at 6:00 pm (2300 GMT), though it was not clear when it would be known who will succeed US President George Bush ending his second four-year term in January.

“The last eight years has been a horror story,” said Michael Smith, a 54-year-old salesman, standing among hundreds stretching around the block at a polling station in Manhattan. He said he would vote for Obama.

“The country itself is slipping in the (popularity) polls,” he said. “In the end that’s what people are going to vote for today — a new direction.” In Christianburg, Virginia, Norma Jean Lundis said she voted for McCain because he “stands for what I believe in — less government, lets me control my money, the right to bear arms, life begins at conception, marriage between man and woman.” History’s longest, costliest White House campaign ended with Obama the hot favourite, enjoying wide leads in national polls and the edge in a string of battleground states which could swing the election either way.

The Hawaii-born Illinois senator’s strategists hoped unusually high turnout of new and younger voters would carry him to victory over his colleague from Arizona.

In the eye of the worst financial storm since the 1930s and with US troops embroiled in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both Obama and McCain have vowed to restore the frayed self-confidence of the world’s lone superpower.

After an epic campaign, a political realignment in Washington was also possible, with Democrats targeting big gains in the Senate and House of Representatives fuelled by Bush’s record unpopularity.

Obama and McCain were chasing the 270 electoral votes needed across the state-by-state electoral map to take the White House. More than 100 million people were expected to trek to the polls to add to 30 million advance votes.

Obama and McCain, one of whom will become the first sitting senator elected president since John F. Kennedy in 1960, hit the finish line on Monday with competing cross-country campaign blitzes.

Obama, 47, told voters they were close to “changing the United States of America,” speaking in Florida as he also whipped up crowds in North Carolina and Virginia, hoping to squeeze his rival on normally Republican territory.

But McCain was defiant on Monday, vowing to confound pollsters and pundits and overcome a treacherous political map which has him struggling to cling to Republican bastions and where one big loss could make Obama president.

“The Mac is back!” he roared at his campaign stops, promising a stunning act of political escapology that would confound almost every major opinion poll.

The decorated Vietnam War hero, 72, raced through Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Indiana, New Mexico and Nevada before heading home to Arizona.

McCain also scheduled an 11th-hour get-out-the-vote campaign in New Mexico and Colorado, two traditionally Republican states under threat from Obama.—AFP