I'd like to point out that, although the recount should have been allowed to finish, CNN erroneously calling Florida for Gore at closing depressed turnout in the Floridian panhandle and cost Bush far more votes than his official margin of victory.
I keep hearing this meme, and it's not exactly true. No network called Florida in the first 48 minutes after the Eastern time zone polls closed.
You are correct that the state was called before polls closed in the last 6% of the state. If you assume that people voted uniformly throughout the day and if you assume that voting came to a
dead stop at 6:49 CST, then voting in the panhandle was depressed by about 1.5%.
If my math is right, the lost voters number about 9 times Bush's margin of victory. If you assume that Bush carried these voters by 55 points, then
Bush's margin of victory would have been increased about six-fold.
These numbers are true
if you make the following assumptions:
1. People in line heard the rumor that the state had been called by the networks.
2. People in line believed that the state had been called. Remember that this was the days before smart phones, so it would have been much harder to check.
3. Every single voter at a polling station stopped and went home.
4. Every single person on their way to the polling station was listening to the radio, and every single one of these was tuned to a station that was broadcasting live news (and not just top-of-the-hour news).
5. Every single person who heard the presidential call on their car radio turned around and went home. (They apparently cared enough about politics to listen to news radio, but not enough to vote in the senate race.)
6. There were huge numbers of people who planned to vote but were somehow still at home watching TV with 11 minutes left before the deadline.
For every one of my assumptions that isn't true, Bush's theoretical margin of victory goes down.(And to put what-ifs in perspective, Ralph Nader's vote count was
more than 100 times the margin of victory.)
