However, the report also states that at 7:00 pm (presumably Eastern), The Dan announced that the polls were closed in Florida -- an hour before they were actually closed in the panhandle.
Also, apologists claim that calling elections early have no effect, since if a candidate has already won, it makes no sense for people to vote for either major candidate. They claim it only adds to the "protest vote" of third party candidates, like Nader.
BUT...even if that were true (and it's not, since it disregards peoples' tendency not to just behave in strict logical game-theory manners), the "closing of the polls" announcement without calling the election DOES have a major impact, when the electorate is not distributed--and/or split--evenly within a voting area. Since the panhandle was likely to vote 2:1 for Bush, the fact that polling places were eerily empty in that last hour, according to reports, indicates Bush lost many legitimate votes from this (more than 10,000 of them, as stated).
BTW, every major network seems to have reported the wrong poll-closing time, to my knowledge...and I think the error might have originated with the VNS, but I'm not sure of it.