How will Vigo Co. vote?

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) - The polls open for Election Day voting in just 30 hours or so and hundreds of political experts across the nation are perfecting the art of polling.

They’re asking everyone who's anyone who they'll be casting their ballots for, but it seems that many of these experts are looking in all the wrong places. Maybe where they need to look is right here in Vigo County.

Since 1956, whichever presidential hopeful won Vigo County ended up in the White House. In fact, not since General Dwight Eisenhower ran against Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson in 1952, has Vigo County voted wrong.

That's because Vigo County is considered a “Bellwether” county. In other words, it’s an area that reflects national trends voter-wise and there’s less than 10 of them across the nation.

So we figured if we're looking for an accurate poll, we better find out who Vigo County is voting for.

In order to be accurate we got a list of the more than 76,000 registered voters in Vigo County. We chopped that list down to people who voted in the May primary and then broke those lists into a sample of how many Republican and Democrat voters found in the county.

Then came the hard part: making the calls. Using a team of News 10 reporters and producers, we randomly started going down the list of voters.

In the beginning the frustration was the phone numbers. More than half of the 500 plus phone calls we made were disconnected lines.

But eventually call, by call, tally, by tally the numbers started to add up. And once we got our 100th voter to participate it was over.

The result: 42 residents planning to vote for President Barack Obama and 48 in favor of Governor Mitt Romney; which matches other polls across the country.

But here's the interesting part, remember we were looking for 100 voters and the final 10 votes were undecided.

Which means the President could easily overtake his challenger if those 10 all sided with him, or Mitt Romney could solidify his lead if he can sway the uncertain.

Either way on a national and local scale it looks like this election will be decided by the undecided.