Miami - Floridians queued Tuesday in hours-long lines on a cloudy, mildly cold day, set to make US history for a huge voter turnout in an election that could put the first African-American into the White House.

Although polling stations opened at 7 am (1200 GMT), the flow of voters started hours earlier. Some people needed to vote before heading to work, while others were just enthusiastic and got carried away by the political hype.

"Four years ago I did not vote, but now I felt that I had to do something to change the current situation," Reutilio Ransola told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

After voting at the Kendall library, Ransola - a young economist whose family migrated to the United States from Venezuela in 1995 - said he was undecided for several weeks before opting to vote for Democrat Barack Obama.

"I was terrified by the news coming out of my country and the arbitrary measures of (Venezuelan President Hugo) Chavez. But after thinking about it coolly, I think Obama is in no way a socialist and he is the right candidate to pull us out of the crisis," he said.

Scores of people stood in two lines at the voting centre in El Doral, a central area in Miami-Dade County. On one line, people delivered absentee ballots. On the other, people got ready to enter the voting room. Once they completed the process, they got a sticker that signalled that they had fulfilled their right to vote.

Carmela Rivera, a black Cuban-American, could hardly hide her joy as she left the polling station. She smiled as she showed off a Republican badge and a photograph of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

"I suffered a lot in Cuba. I do not want to relive what I went through there," she told dpa.

Micaela Hamels and Ernest Montoya, a young couple, admitted that the economic situation led them to favour Obama.

"For years we were indifferent to the situation in the country, but now my father is unemployed and Ernest's family is facing mortgage foreclosure," she said.

"Some time ago we did not worry about anything. Our world was rosy. Parties, walks and fun, with the single obligation to study," Montoya said. "Everything changed and we have to fight so that the crisis will not sink us all."

In the polling station at the Kendall school, there was no need for a long wait to cast one's vote.

After he exercised his right, Iraq war veteran Robert Gomez argued that troops "need the backing that McCain offers."

"We cannot let our enemies become defiant so that we have another terrorist attack that puts at risk the lives of our families," he said.

Despite the high turnout, and expectations of problems with new voting technology, few problems were reported. In Orlando, an estimated three-hour-long line was still queued outside with less than three hours left before polls close at 0100 GMT, CNN reported.

"So far there is complete discipline," Lourdes Viamontes, one of the people in charge of voter organization in Kendall, told dpa. "We hope everything stays like that for the rest of the day."

Over 4 million voters, of a total of 11.2 million people registered to vote in Florida, had exercised their right to vote early in Florida from October 20-November 2.

Florida was the decisive state in presidential elections in 2000, when only several hundred votes separated Republican George W Bush and Democrat Al Gore. After a recount had started, the case worked its way up through the courts and the nation waited for weeks for a final decision by the US Supreme Court, which ordered a stop to the recount and thus awarded the narrow victory to Bush.