EDITORIAL ELECTION FRAUD IF ANYONE STOLE THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE, IT WAS NETWORK TV.

THE winner of the presidential race may still be in doubt, but the loser is obvious: television news.

Tuesday night, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox and CNN slugged it out to see who could get the news out the fastest, with little concern as to whether they got it right, or the effects that their predictions would have in states where the polls were still open.

They got it wrong not once but twice, turning an agonizingly close election into a chaotic crisis of confidence in our electoral processes. The talking heads on the idiot box acted like idiots.

Shortly after the polls closed on the East Coast, the networks predicted that Gore had won the critical state of Florida - a forecast based entirely on exit polls, not actual tallies.

The result is that the TV plague that has skewed California elections for years has now wreaked havoc and confusion throughout the country. Polls in Florida's Panhandle region, which is in the Central Time Zone, were still open for another hour but those voters were already counted out by the networks.

How many people in that region stayed home thinking their vote didn't matter? How many people across the country stayed home because Gore had swept Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida and appeared headed to easy victory?

About an hour later, the networks figured out they got in wrong. Florida was up for grabs. Suddenly, voters mattered again - even though the polls were already closed in Florida and many other states.

After further review, the networks in lock step declared Bush the winner in Florida and thus the president-elect of the nation. Some wire services, major newspapers reporting from Florida and others across the country - including the Daily News - printed some early editions with Bush as the winner, citing the networks and the campaigns.

Gore, like everybody else, accepted the verdict and called Bush to concede the election and then set out to thank his supporters in a losing cause. Two blocks away from the rally in Nashville, the Gore campaign figured out the election was still up for grabs. Oops! So much for conceding defeat.

At 2:18 a.m. on the East Coast, the networks agreed: Florida could go either way. There was no winner - yet.

All night long, the networks made bold predictions based on exit polls before a single precinct even reported. California's polls weren't closed for five minutes before the TV gurus claimed to have the state all figured out.

They declared incumbent Sen. Slade Gorton a loser in Washington state and had to backtrack as he pulled ahead.

TV's rush to provide results in real time without taking responsibility for the impact of what that does has undermined the credibility of the election result in the presidential race.

Bush versus Gore may prove to be the closest race in history, and it may have been decided by those who didn't vote - cowed into irrelevance by an industry that should have been more responsible.

TV execs need to think long and hard between now and the next election about what's best for the people, not what's best for their ratings.