Both crude oil trader Susan Roesch and real estate agent Pat Remele considered the war in Iraq as the single most important element in their voting decision. But Roesch voted for President George W. Bush while Remele chose Bush' s rival John Kerry.
Engineer Bradley Hargroves and his wife went out of their voting station hand in hand, but they had voted in opposite directions.
The scene at the Spring Hill ballot station in Fairfax, Virginia was typical of an America severely divided virtually on every issue from the war on terrorism to women's abortion rights as voters went to more than 200,000 stations around the country to elect the next president on Tuesday.
"Fighting terrorism and keeping the country safe is the No. 1 issue for me," Roesch told Xinhua as she left the Spring Hill voting station after casting her vote. "I trust Bush on that issue. "
But Remele, who described herself as a life-long Democrat, said the Iraq war made her feel especially bad. " I feel very strongly that we should not have gone to the war in Iraq," she said.
Remele said she voted for Kerry because the senator "can examine the facts and change his mind when the facts are showing his mind should be changed." In contrast, Bush "is stuck in his own little world and does not have the capability to change his mind" as new evidence emerges, she said.
Polls have shown that the Iraq war was the dominating issue as a record estimated 143 million American people went to vote this year.
But Hargroves and his wife voted differently because they have different concerns. Mrs. Hargroves, who said she is neither a Republican nor a Democrat, voted for Kerry because the senator supports women's rights of abortion.
"How I voted? I made sure that I voted to cancel each other," Mr. Hargroves said, smiling. He said economy concerns him the most and believes Bush will adopt "more aggressive policies" to spur the economic growth than Kerry.
Because the race was so close to call, the two camps have made every effort to energize their supporters to vote and to prevent the other side from fraudulent actions.
At the entrance to the Spring Hill voting station, which was located in a community recreation center about 20 minutes drive from Washington, volunteers from both Republican and Democratic parties handed over leaflets in a last effort to swing one or two undecided voters and watched for those supporters who did not appear.
"Starting from 1 o'clock in the afternoon, we are going to call those Republican voters who did not come to vote and remind them," said Bill Moore, the Republican chairman of the Kenmore precinct.
Inside the voting station, six partisan election watchers, three Republicans and three Democrats, sat behind a long desk comparing the voter registrations with their name lists.
"We are doing this to make sure that if disputes emerged, we could double-check who came and who did not," said John Ryan, a Republican election watcher. Since the traditionally-Republican Virginia is not one of the battleground states, however, the watchers had no much to monitor.
"We get along very well," said Aggie Wolf, a Democratic watcher who sat beside Ryan. They said they did not challenge the eligibility of the other party's voters as in Ohio, where a federal appeals court ruled early Tuesday morning to allow the Republican Party to place thousands of people inside polling places to challenge the eligibility of voters.
About four hours after the polling station opened, more than 1, 000 of the 3,500 voters in the Kenmore precinct have cast their votes.
"The turnover is really huge," said Ryan. "I have lived in Washington for 40 years and this is the first time I have seen so huge a turnover," he said. "Me, too," Wolf nodded agreement.
No matter how divided the voters may be, they agreed on one things: There is no way to predict the result of the election since the two candidates have been locked in a dead heat.
"I don't know what's going to happen tonight." This is the typical answer to question regarding whether the voter believed the candidate he or she supports would win the election.