Barack Obama, in case you had not heard, has been elected the 44th President of the United States.

As jubilant fans and gleeful commentators predict a shining new dawn for democracy and the world at large, no one has really mentioned Missouri.

On all the maps beamed on to screens and reproduced on newspaper pages, blue and red swaths cover the states to indicate their Republican or Democrat votes after Tuesday night's historic election. But the state of Missouri remains grey.

The Midwestern state is still "undecided", and is still, even three days later, too close to call.

And Missourians have reason to take their time. They have long had the reputation of being a bellwether state, and have voted for the winning candidate in every Presidential election since 1904, barring 1956.

But this time, it looks as though they have got it wrong. Mr McCain currently leads Mr Obama in the count by 49.5 per cent to 49.3 per cent, or by 1,442,673 to 1,436,184 — a margin of just 6,489 votes.

Although all balloted votes have been counted, however, there are 7,085 provisional votes that have not yet been accounted for. A provisional ballot is handed out to voters when there is no time or capacity to check their voting details at the polling station, so their vote is taken in and will be counted pending checks on their identity. This verification is expected to take place some time next week.

St Louis County election officials have said that about 3,000 of the uncounted ballots were cast at county polling stations, and another 750 came from St Louis itself. Around 800 were cast in Kansas City, and the others are from all over the state.

Most of these areas are Democrat strongholds, and so will probably have voted for Barack Obama. True enough, 93 per cent of them would have to have been cast for Mr Obama to give him Missouri and further consolidate his near landslide, but uncertainty remains in a state that on Tuesday voted for a Democrat Governor, Jay Nixon, over his Republican rival Kenny Hulshof.

The army of lawyers hired by both sides have rolled their sleeves up to contest any decisions, and Republicans will be quick to question provisional ballots wrongly handed out or filled in by voters at the wrong polling station.

The likelihood is that McCain will hold Missouri, as in previous elections fewer than half of provisional ballots were accepted and counted, which would not be enough to give Mr Obama the state, even if they were all cast in his favour.

According to David Kimball, professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri-St Louis, Missouri may have to bid farewell to its bellwether status, because the state has become more Republican than the nation as a whole.

Jared Craighead, the state Republican Party executive director, said that despite Mr Obama's intense campaigning in rural Missouri, his "liberal message was not going to resonate with Missouri voters, and it didn't. I don't see how Democrats spin this as a positive at all for them in Missouri."

The outcome of the Missouri vote will not affect the outcome of the election as a whole, other than as an inconsequential softening of the blow of a resounding defeat for John McCain and the Not-So-Grand old Party.

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