Barack Obama’s elder daughter yawned, the younger clutched his left leg impatiently. After all, what could be more tiresome for Malia, 10 and Sasha, 7, than having to watch their dad vote for himself as President of the United States?

The American public, however, disagreed. A wave of excitement and energy washed across the country as long queues appeared before dawn to make their choice after an epic and historically charged campaign.

At the Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School in the South Side of Chicago, where Mr Obama voted yesterday morning, he narrowly avoided a pair of embarrassing neighbours. Bill Ayers, a radical bomber turned university lecturer – whose past association with the Democrat has flickered across the campaign – left the polling station shortly before him. So did Louis Farrakhan, the controversial leader of Nation of Islam.

As he voted, Mr Obama grinned benignly at his children before noting that his wife, Michelle, “took a long time” to complete the long and complex ballot. “I had to check to see who she was voting for,” he said wryly.

The final hours of the campaign had, he admitted, been a “bittersweet time” after the death of his grandmother, who he had hoped would survive long enough to see him elected.

“There is great joy as well as tears,” he told a rally on Monday night. Right until the end, though, his campaign displayed the clockwork coordination and discipline that it had made a trade-mark over the past 21 months. Seconds after television stations finished covering Mr Obama’s vote they switched to live pictures from Wilmington, Delaware – where his running-mate Joe Biden arrived outside his polling station.

Mr Obama then boarded his plane for a short flight to Indianapolis, where he manned phone banks and told volunteers: “It’s going to be tight as a tick here in Indiana.” Tommy Vietor, a campaign spokesman, upgraded his Facebook status from “cautiously nauseous” to “optimistically nauseous”. More than 70,000 tickets were issued for Mr Obama’s election-night party in Chicago.

John McCain’s more haphazard campaign was also conforming to type. The Republican appeared briefly on the balcony of his 11th-floor apartment in Phoenix, Arizona, with “bed hair”, sipping coffee and chatting on his mobile phone until an aide noticed photographers. His campaign plane was later forced to dramatically abort a landing in New Mexico and return for a second attempt because of runway traffic.

His running-mate, Sarah Palin, was up before sunrise in Wasilla, Alaska, to cast her ballot. Wearing a warm, hooded jacket, she teased reporters by refusing to say for whom she had voted. Such a constitutional right to privacy was, she said, one of the things that was “really cool about America”. Mrs Palin was glad to be home “because for ever I’m going to be Sarah from Alaska”.

While hoping and praying that she would wake up today as her country’s first female vice-president, the Alaskan Governor also recognised that Mr Obama could be the first black president. “This is an historical event, no matter which ticket prevails,” she said.

The scale of the turnout across the country was immense, with big queues forming well before dawn as people waited for up to four hours to cast their votes. There were also problems and glitches, and accusations from both sides of dirty tricks and voter suppression. The McCain campaign issued an email to reporters alleging voter intimidation and irregularities in Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, Virginia and New Mexico.

In Palm Beach County, Florida – Ground Zero in the disputed, hanging chad recount of 2000 – ballots were rejected because voters had failed to mark their preferences on a second page. Rain in Virginia – another crucial battleground – was causing soggy voting slips to be rejected by optical scanning machines.

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