Current US President and Democrat Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney are locked in a tight race with three critical battleground states (Florida, Ohio and Virginia) too close to call as US voters keep the balance from clearly tilting in either candidate's favour.
This is one of the costliest elections the US has ever seen.
In early results, Obama and Romney won in the states they were expected to win easily. Early vote-counting in Florida showed them running close. Obama led in the critical battleground state of Ohio while Romney held an early lead in Virginia.
According to CNN projections at 8.30 am IST, Romney led the President 158 electoral votes to 147 electoral votes.
According to poll surveys and analysts, Romney needs all three of those states to navigate a narrow path to the presidency, while Obama can afford to lose one or two of them and still win a second Presidential term.
At least 120 million voters rendered their judgment between the Democratic incumbent and Romney after a long, expensive and bitter presidential campaign that magnified the differences between the candidates' vision for the US. It is yet to see what the Americans have chosen - to continue Obama's approach to fixing the ailing economy or Romney, who wants to try a new approach.
So far, Obama has won Michigan, the Republican's state of birth but where Romney repelled voters by opposing an auto industry bailout pushed by Obama. Some polls had shown a tight race there. Obama has also been projected to win Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where Romney had hoped to pull off a surprise win and had visited these states recently.
Television networks projected Romney the winner in Republican states Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Indiana. He was declared the winner in Texas, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.
Obama was projected the winner in the Democratic strongholds of Maryland, Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts and his home state of Illinois, as well as Washington, DC, New York and New Jersey.
National opinion polls before the election showed Obama and Romney in a virtual dead heat, although Obama had a slight advantage in several vital swing states - most notably Ohio - that could give him the 270 electoral votes needed to win the state-by-state contest.
Unlike India and in most of the democracies across the world where the entire nation has one time for the opening and closing of polls, the election schedule in the United States, world's largest democracies, varies from State to State.
In US, the President is not chosen by the popular vote, but indirectly through the electoral college, in which states vote based on population, with a candidate needing 270 out of 538 electoral votes to win.
