Barber Bert Downing gives Kiel Sprawls a hair cut as they talk about their support of President Barack Obama and the election at Carter's Barbershop in Chicago on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012. At right is a wall decorated with pictures of historical black leaders. The barber shop sits on the edge of a West Side ward that supported the president by a 99 percent-plus majority in 2008. And the regulars are pleased with his policies. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
United Auto Workers member Keely Bell, right, helps Cecilia Mealy find her polling location, while knocking on doors on Election Day in Warren, Mich., Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
United Auto Workers member Keely Bell, right, helps Cecilia Mealy find her polling location, while knocking on doors to remind people to vote on Election Day Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012 in Warren, Mich. For Bell, 42, this was her first up-close view of a UAW Election Day. She'd been out of work for two-and-a-half years, after losing a long-time office job, when a rebounding Chrysler hired her to a nearby assembly two years ago. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
On this election day, as they do every day, people gather for breakfast in the Nutcracker Restaurant, a 1950's-style diner, in Pataskala, Ohio on Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012. From left are Ken Armentrout, Lewie Hoskinson and Jack Cruikshank. Hoskinson, center, is a retired city worker who his friends claim is the only President Barack Obama supporter in the town of 14,000. "I'm sure there are others, but I'm the only one who will admit it," he said, as his buddies laughed. His friends acknowledged that they weren't exactly thrilled with Mitt Romney as an alternative but said Obama hadn't done enough to get the economy moving. (AP Photo/Michael E. Keating)
Selma Friedman, 102, makes her way through the corridors of her St. Andrew Estates South retirement community on her way to cast her vote early Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012, in Boca Raton, Fla. Selma, originally from East Orange, N.J., first voted for Franklin Delano Rooosevelt in 1932. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)
People stand in line to cast their votes on Election Day as the polls opened at a precinct at the Wake County Firearms Education and Training Center in Apex, N.C., Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012. (AP Photo/Gerry Broome)
Behind a sign barring loaded firearms in the building, people stand in line to cast their votes on Election Day as the polls opened at a precinct at the Wake County Firearms Education and Training Center in Apex, N.C., Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012. (AP Photo/Gerry Broome)
Behind a sign barring loaded firearms in the building, people stand in line to cast their votes on Election Day as the polls opened at a precinct at the Wake County Firearms Education and Training Center in Apex, N.C., Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012. (AP Photo/Gerry Broome)
Under the lights of a generator, voters wait in line outside of a tent serving as a polling site in the Midland Beach section of Staten Island, New York, on Election Day Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012. The original polling site, a school, was damaged by Superstorm Sandy. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Under the lights of a generator, voters wait in line outside of a tent serving as a polling site in the Midland Beach section of Staten Island, New York, on Election Day Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012. The original polling site, a school, was damaged by Superstorm Sandy. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Under the lights of a generator, voters wait in line outside of a tent serving as a polling site in the Midland Beach section of Staten Island, New York, on Election Day Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012. The original polling site, a school, was damaged by Superstorm Sandy. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
On Election Day, Americans took time to vote, and to explain why this ritual means so much to them. At polling places and in luncheonettes, in the storm-battered New York metro area and a California city hobbled by foreclosure, in precincts large and small, they …