Florida's Eastern time zone region showed a turnout rate of 68 percent. But turnout in the Central time zone region of the heavily Republican panhandle – where the news networks called the state for Gore before the polls had closed – turnout was only 65 percent, figures provided by the Florida State Department's Division of Elections show.
If the panhandle turnout had not been depressed by the media call and had stayed consistent with the statewide turnout rate of 68 percent, roughly 16,000 more voters would have gone to the polls.
A poll by Republican pollster John McLaughlin and Associates found that these registered voters in the panhandle, who were discouraged from voting by the media's premature call, would have voted for Bush by a 2-to-1 margin, thus widening Bush's lead by at least 5,000 votes.
"This expanded margin would have rendered much of the current litigation and manual recounting unnecessary," a spokesman for McLaughlin and Associates said.
In a recent letter to the networks, Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., chairman of the House Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications, said he would lead an investigation into the premature projection for the battleground state of Florida.
Tauzin said CNN projected wins for Gore in states in which he led by at least 6 percentage points soon after polls closed but waited longer to predict Bush wins in states where he had a similar margin.
"The evidence is mounting that there was some kind of bias in this system," Tauzin said.
Shortly before 8 p.m. EST on election night, less than an hour after most of Florida's polls closed, the liberal ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC news programs erroneously declared Gore the winner of Florida's 25 electoral votes, which would have put him on track to winning the 270 votes needed to become president.
Later on election night, the networks called Florida for Bush, only to retract it after it became clear how close the tally was and that a recount would be called.
After congressional investigations in 1985 into complaints about early broadcast calls discouraging voters on the West Coast, network executives promised not to broadcast exit poll numbers on any state until the polls in that state closed.
Statewide, 5,961,266 Florida residents voted, or 68 percent of the 8,752,717 registered voters.
However, in the part of Florida located in the Central time zone, only 65 percent, or 353,527 people voted. There were 540,610 registered voters in the region.
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