Election Month? By Hank Silverberg On November 3rd at about 8 p.m. on the east coast, millions of Americans will sit down in front of a TV or scan the internet looking for the election results. They will start coming in significant numbers around 9 p.m., and news networks will start predicting which candidate has won which state. It's happened that way since the late 1950's when TV came of age. With a few exceptions, Americans have gone to bed on election night knowing who has won the presidency. (Courtesy Library of Congress) In 1948, the Chicago Tribune jumped the gun to meet a printing deadline and declared Republican Thomas Dewey the winner before a significant number of votes came in from the west. That produced one of the most notorious journalism errors in history. But by the next morning, the actual returns gave victory to Harry Truman. In 2000, a close election between George W. Bush and Al Gore combined with trouble counting ballots in Florida held up ...