• by November 9, 2000

Could fate be telling us something? Because it seems that this particular Presidential Election has been doomed from the start. Without going to far back into the past, one could say it all started when hackers hit both a Republican and a Democrat website just hours before polls in the U.S. presidential election opened Tuesday.

The Republican National Committee's website (http://www.RNC.org) was hacked late Monday and replaced with a lengthy anti-Bush tirade. It contained an unsigned line of text saying "a vote for Bush is a vote for myself at the expense of everyone else living in this strange and savage land."

"It's obviously a dirty trick late in the campaign by the Democrats," said Tom Yu, spokesman of the Republican National Committee. Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee's website (http://www.DNC.org) was also infiltrated late Monday. The Democratic National Committee said in a statement that its website suffered "repeated attacks" causing it to shut down.

But it didn't end there. Most Americans awoke Wednesday morning groggy from the previous nights vigil all asking the same question, "So, is it Gore or Bush?" But Network newsies said that the mix up wasn't their fault, claiming that it was the Voter News Service - the consortium that supplies the four major networks, CNN and AP with voter exit polling data, as well actual vote tallies - that bungled the job on election night, giving them bad data about the Florida turnout. That led the networks to give Gore Florida at about 8 p.m., only to retract it around 10 p.m. The networks then gave the state to Bush some time after 2 a.m., only to retract that second projection at about 4 a.m.

The second goof up couldn't be blamed on bad data however. One network official admitted that that they simply went "too early" and that with 90% of the votes in, existing computer models for projecting the turnout failed. Governor Bush of Florida said both presidential candidates were "unfairly treated by the early projections," made by the networks.

Some were likening the network's performance to the Chicago Tribune's "Dewey Beats Truman" headline in 1948. Even network journalists said they goofed. Dan Rather at one point on the air in the wee hours of Wednesday morning said viewers were probably "disgusted" with the bad calls, "and you should be." NBC's Katie Couric said the networks belonged in the "losers column" for their bad calls, while colleague Tim Russert chimed in that the networks blew it, "not once but twice." Several networks, including CNN and ABC, said they were reviewing their entire projection process.