While the world waits to know the outcome in the U.S., here's a quick look at how the stock market has done as a predictor of presidential races.

 

Since 1900, the incumbent won 80 per cent of the time when the index rose, Sam Stovall, a chief equity strategist at Standard and Poor's, has found. Good news for Obama, since the index was up over that period.

 

However, over at the Stock Traders Almanac, Jeffrey Hirsch looked at the S&P 500 for just the one month, October, preceding an election, and he came up with a different result.

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In a U.S. election tradition since 1948, registered voters in two New Hampshire precincts became the first to cast ballots on Election Day 2012.
 
Forty-three people in the villages of Dixville Notch and Hart's Location went to the polls at midnight ET.
 
In what could be a shape of things to come, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney got five votes each in Dixville Notch -a tie, which, according to the precinct captain, has never happened before.

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After seeing the wildly disparate predictions this year in the Alberta and Quebec elections, it's becoming a little harder for us Canadians to rely on opinion polls.
 
But that hasn't stopped our friends south of the border from trying to predict tomorrow's presidential result, even though their polling data, too, has been literally all over the map, with noted discrepencies in some cases between national and state numbers.
 
To no one's real surprise, Karl Rove, George W. Bush's electoral strategist extraordinaire, released his final state-by-state forecast for Tuesday's election in which he expects Mitt Romney to become the president elect.

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In this final report of our series America's Broken Dream, we meet people in central Florida who, on the eve of this oh-so-close election, are furiously trying to get the vote out in the face of new state laws that many feel are aimed at keeping certain types of voters from the polls. 

They are working hard to ensure democracy still works

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America's biggest, most important city is seriously wounded, and millions more along the Eastern Seaboard are still wallowing, dazed, in the soggy filth left behind by this week's superstorm.

 

But the two men running for president have decided the respectful pause is over.

 

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were back on the stump Thursday, peddling the mixture of distortions, nose-stretchers, preening and pandering that passes for serious political discourse in modern America.

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