Garden State up for grabs: Jersey City is only a 10-minute ferry ride across the Hudson from Manhattan but yesterday the river symbolised a fault line in American presidential politics.
Enthusiasm among voters was high in both places. But everyone knew that New York state was safely in John Kerry's camp. However, on the Jersey City side, where shining new waterfront towers mask a down-at-heel town centre, every vote counted.
The state of New Jersey usually votes Democratic but in this election it became a battleground between President Bush and Senator Kerry.
Here was a real election fight. Mr Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, First Lady Laura Bush and the Bush twins Jenna and Barbara all campaigned in the Garden State in the closing weeks as polls showed the Democratic lead dwindling to a statistical dead heat.
The main reason for the vote swing seemed to be the searing experience of the 9/11 attacks which hit New Jersey commuters hard. On the river's edge, looking across at downtown Manhattan, a rusting, twisted girder from the World Trade centre memorialises the 40 city residents who died in the twin towers.
"A lot of people here are going for the war because of that, and that means they support Bush," said a retired Hispanic bank worker handing out pamphlets outside the polling station in Metropolis Towers, adding, "But I think the Democrats will still win." Nearby I came across a Kerry-Edwards placard, but it was a spoof planted by Republicans that read: "Vote Kerry because France knows what's best for America."
Most of the posters plastered around the city were in fact for the 11 candidates running for mayor, a race which was generating much more heat locally. In the US Americans vote on presidential election day for mayors, sheriffs, judges, and local congress members and senators. One of the candidates was a realtor who said God prompted him to run for mayor.
Yesterday voters got another message from the heavens when a tiny yellow monoplane flew along the Hudson trailing a banner with the anti-war sentiment: "Action causes more trouble than thought".
Around the poorer parts of Jersey City some of the 10,000 volunteers organised by the Democratic Party throughout the state were out knocking on doors in the crisp autumn air, "leaving no stone unturned," as a spokesman said.
A Democratic vote organiser told me they were watching for any sign of a trick the Republicans had used in a mayoral election in Philadelphia. There, men with ear pieces had stood watchfully beside official-looking cars parked near polling booths in heavily Democratic black districts, to intimidate potential voters into thinking they were FBI.
Nearly 80 per cent of black voters in one nationwide poll said they believed states would make deliberate efforts to stop them from voting.
Late on Monday a Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio added to this perception when it allowed Republican Party poll-watchers to target predominantly black precincts. Republicans in Ohio claim that many new voter applications are fraudulent, with names like Mary Poppins.
In New Jersey a Republican Party organiser said they had 21,000 volunteers stationed at polling sites across the state to help get the vote out and watch for fraud. After the polls began narrowing they got a grant of $300,000 from the Republican National Committee so that they, too, could leave no stone unturned.
There was a bit of a scare at a school being used as a polling place in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, which closed for two hours yesterday morning so a white substance on the floor could be checked out. It turned out to be table salt.
Elsewhere minor troubles disrupted voting temporarily.
In New Orleans all three voting machines failed to work in one precinct and voters were told to come back later, said Bill Quigley, a lawyer working for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). In South Carolina officials said voters were forced to switch to paper ballots for 90 minutes before technicians got the touch-screen election machines up and running.
In Volusia County, Florida, a memory card in an optical-scan voting machine failed at an early voting site and didn't count 13,000 ballots, but they were to be counted back in yesterday.
Before voting even began in Philadelphia, Republican poll-watchers said they found nearly 2,000 votes already planted on machines. Officials said the problem was a failure to de-programme old results. Back in New York a queue had formed at the polling station a block from ground zero.
People complained that they could not access the city's website to find polling places the day before, and callers to the Board of Electors telephone found it busy most of the day. The problem seemed to be huge voter turn-out plus incompetence.
In New York more than 400,000 people have registered for the first time, bringing voter rolls up to 4.5 million. Even though the state's electoral votes were destined for Kerry, both Republican and Democratic voters were determined as never before to have their voices heard, here and everywhere else.