Image credit: @BarackObama/Twitter

Twitter has called its own race. At 10:01 p.m. ET, Twitter announced that it had hit 20 million election-related tweets, making Election Day 2012 the most tweeted-about event in U.S. political history.

As a reference, there were close to 20 million tweets about Hurricane Sandy over the span of last week and 10 million tweets during the first presidential debate. Twitter has not released the exact details on the peaks - it will likely do that tomorrow when all is said and done - but at 9:26 p.m. when the Pennsylvania results were announced there was a peak of 66,019 tweets per minute (TPM) and at around 10:45 p.m. there was a spike of 69,000 TPM. At one point during the night, close to when the results began to hit, there were 327,000 TPM.

Throughout the day voting topics have trended on the service, including #stayinline, referring to those standing in the voting lines or urging those to tough out the wait. The impact was also showing on the candidates' Twitter feeds. As of 10:45 @barackobama had a 123,782 retweets on the following tweet "RT it you're on #TeamObama tonight."