NARRATOR: Did the last four years not really happen? Look, there's Ben Affleck. He's often in my dreams. And the taxi driver guy. He was there too. And little Stevie Wonder, he seemed so happy, like a miracle had taken place. Was it a dream? Or was it real? It was election night 2000 and everything seemed to be going as planned. Series of news clips: In New York, Al Gore is our projected winner. / The Garden State is green for Gore. / We project that Mr. Gore is the winner in Delaware. This state has voted with the winner in... / (Tom Brokaw interrupts) Mike, you know I wouldn't do this if it weren't big: Florida goes for Al Gore. / CNN announces that we call Florida in the Al Gore column. NARRATOR: Then something called the Fox News Channel called the election in favor of the other guy. BRIT HUME: Sorry to interrupt you; Fox News now projects George W. Bush the winner in Florida and thus it appears the winner of the Presidency of the United States. NARRATOR: All of a sudden the other networks said, "Hey, if Fox said it, it must be true." TOM BROKAW: All of us networks made a mistake and projected Florida in the Al Gore column. It was our mistake. NARRATOR: Now what most people don't know is that the man who was in charge of the decision desk at Fox that night, the man who called it for Bush was none other than Bush's first cousin, John Ellis. How does someone like Bush get away with something like this?

VNS has sent a preliminary report to its members indicating that the mistaken Gore call was "a combination of many factors" -- among them, an unexpectedly large rise in the number of absentee Florida voters, which increased the potential for inaccurate projections. Also: VNS may have overestimated the size of the black vote and underestimated the size of the Cuban vote, both of which mistakes could have made things look better for Gore. The erroneous Bush call, the report shows, was based mostly on incorrect results coming out of Volusia County, as well as on an understatement of Palm Beach County's outstanding votes. As is customary on election days, VNS fed its members three sources of information: exit polls, actual vote results from a sample of precincts, and unofficial county returns. VNS also supplies projections to the member organizations, each of which maintains its own independent decision desk and is individually responsible for the calls it makes. Under an agreement with Congress in 1985, networks call no winners in a state until the majority of its polls are closed. (snip) Exit polls were even less a source of the problem in the egregious projection of Bush as victor just after 2 a.m. With 97 percent of the precincts reporting, Bush enjoyed an apparent 51,000 vote lead with (supposedly) about 180,000 votes yet to be counted, Mitofsky recalls. "We were well aware of the absentee votes, and well aware of where votes were missing. We knew that much of the outstanding vote was going to come from Democratic areas in Broward and Palm Beach counties. At the time we made the call, we expected Bush's lead to drop to about thirty to 35,000. We found out later that there were close to 400,000 votes outstanding, not 180,000. There were errors in Volusia County and elsewhere that nobody told us about. You can't make correct calls if you're looking at wrong data." Volusia County was a morass of problems on election night, NBC's Gawiser remembers. At one point, county officials ran totals through their computer and concluded that the Socialist Workers party got 9,000 votes -- a virtual impossibility. Over at AP, Wolman's analysts were trying to decide if Bush's apparent lead was impregnable. When the networks made Bush the winner, AP's team hurriedly began poring over county returns. "Our decision desk concluded that there were so many Democratic votes out there that Gore might be able to catch up," Wolman recalls. Reuters moved a story at 2:31 that Bush was the new president. At 2:37, AP advised its clients in an urgent update that the race was not over. Then at 3:11, it moved a "cautionary advisory" that Bush's lead in Florida had shrunk to about 6,000 votes and that uncounted returns in two mostly Democratic counties could determine the outcome. Subsequently, in a "special message" to AP's newspaper and broadcast members, AP president Louis Boccardi built some space between his agency and the other five VNS partners. While acknowledging that AP did hand Florida to Gore early in the evening, he added that, on the Bush tally, "the pressure to join the parade was enormous, but AP people . . . held firm, to their great credit." (snip) Two TV-related events conjoined to lead newspapers over the cliff. First: the 2:16 projection for Bush by Fox News, echoed within four minutes by NBC, CBS, CNN, and ABC. (Fox consultant John Ellis, the governor's cousin, got credit for starting the stampede, a gesture that raised prickly questions about the journalistic propriety of a candidate's relative occupying so sensitive a post.) Second: TV reports that Gore had conceded in a phone call to Bush and was heading for the War Memorial in Nashville to make it official. Says Rich Oppel: "I should have relied on AP. But a seasoned editor, looking at those two factors together, has got to put a lot of weight on them. They pretty much ended the contest for most newspapers."