Cleveland Plain Dealer
Barack Obama won Ohio by 166,214 votes, final tally shows
By Rich Exner
Friday, December 07, 2012, 8:54 AM 

Ohio's final election results released Thursday show that Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney by 166,214 votes, or 3 percentage points. 

Both the turnout and margin of victory were down from 2008, when Obama defeated Republican John McCain. But the 5,580,822 people who cast ballots in this year's presidential race were the third most in Ohio history, behind only 2008 and 2004. 

The final tally shows Obama with 2,827,621 votes (50.7 percent) to Romney's 2,661,407 votes (47.7 percent). Another 91,794 people voted for other candidates. 

The Democrat did especially well in the tabulations since the initial unofficial tally was released the day after the election. Obama won nearly two-thirds of the votes added since then, mostly from provisional or late-arriving absentee ballots. 

Though Obama's margin of victory was smaller than in 2008, when he defeated McCain by 262,224 votes, he did win by more votes than Republican George Bush did in both 2004 (118,601) and 2000 (165,019). 

Percentage-wise, Bush won by 2.1 points in 2004 and 3.5 points in 2000. 

Read the rest of the article at the Cleveland Plain Dealer