Voters in Ohio felt like kingmakers yesterday as the toss-up race for the White House looked set to be decided in their battleground state.

Months of frenzied phone calls, television ads and campaign speeches gave way at last to one heady reality: voters here know it is hard for President Barack Obama or rival Republican Mitt Romney to win without their support.

For Romney in particular, there were few paths to victory that did not pass through this Midwestern Rust Belt state.

Keenly aware of this, the Republican flew to Cleveland yesterday to rally volunteers for a final get-out-the-vote push at a campaign office.

One Ohio resident, Dave Rossi, said he dodged the flood of calls from pollsters and political groups that have bedeviled most Ohio voters because he uses an unlisted cell phone instead of a landline.

But the Republican still got the message: his vote mattered. That is the lesson he wanted his children to learn when he brought them to his polling place in the affluent Cleveland suburb of Highland Heights.

“I felt it inside that I needed to vote, more than I ever did,” he said, after casting his ballot for Romney.

Sobhy Khalil, who also voted for Romney in Highland Heights, said he is glad the race is finally over.

His polling place was busy but, unlike the mess of 2004 when voters had to wait hours to cast their ballots and many simply walked away, the lines moved quickly.

The 2004 debacle – which saw President George W. Bush win a second term after fewer than 119,000 votes in Ohio gave him a narrow electoral college advantage – led the Buckeye State to adopt flexible early voting rules.

Nearly 1.8 million people in Ohio voted early, which explained why there were so few lines observed yesterday morning at several stations visited by AFP.