Obama casts vote in Chicago

Barack Obama has cast his ballot in the election he hopes will make him the country’s first black president.
   
Obama and his wife, Michelle, were among the first to vote after polls opened Tuesday at Chicago’s Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School. They cast paper ballots in side-by-side booths with their two daughters looking on.
   
The family was ushered inside ahead of a line of their Hyde Park neighbors that wrapped around the block. Fellow voters inside watched in silence and snapped cell-phone pictures, then cheered
when he held up his validation slip with a smile and said, “I voted.“
   
Obama voted a few minutes after William Ayers, the 1960s radical who lives in the neighborhood and whom Republicans tried to link to Obama in the campaign.