America goes to polls today

WASHINGTON (Agencies) - Millions of Americans will vote on Tuesday (today) to elect a new president and will encounter an unfamiliar low-tech landscape at the polls as well.

The focus will be on 11 states that will determine the next occupant of the White House. Unlike the other 41 states that are already firmly behind specific candidates, these 11 can be won by either Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain. That explains why they are called swing or battleground states.

The 11 battleground states are Indiana, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Florida, New Hampshire, Colorado and Nevada.

With a combined 141 electoral college votes, the swing states are a must-win for either candidate. That explains why Obama and McCain have spent the last weeks campaigning in these states.

Past elections illustrate the importance of swing states. In 2000, Republican George Bush edged out Democrat Al Gore after beating him by about 500 votes in Florida to carry the state’s 25 electoral college votes. In 2004, Bush defeated Democrat John Kerry but that time, the crucial swing state was Ohio.

About half of all voters will vote in a way that is different from what they did in the last presidential election, and most will use paper ballots rather than the touch-screen machines that have caused concern among voting experts.

But the change does not guarantee a smooth election day, as the nation’s voting system remains untested for what is expected to be an unprecedented turnout. Six years after the largest federal overhaul in how elections are run, voting experts are still predicting machine and ballot shortages in several swing states and late tallies on election night.

Two-thirds of voters will mark their choice with a pencil on a paper ballot that is counted by an optical scanning machine, a method considered far more reliable and verifiable than touch screens. But paper ballots bring their own potential problems, voting experts say.