Florida had issues with the vote count, causing it to be too close to call but Fox News called the state for George W Bush early on and the other networks followed their lead afterwards.
To find out who won Florida (and as a result, the Presidency) a recount was required and was pushed HARD by the Democrats who were contesting the votes and claiming the voting ballots/machines were broken and malfunctioning (the infamous hanging chad thing) required such a detailed recount.
But the Clintons had pissed off a lot of local Florida rank and file Democrats over their handling of the Elian Gonzales debacle, combined with Florida having a huge Cuban population who already hate and distrust the Demcorats (who DESPISE Cubans for being "race traitors" because they support the GOP not the Democrats like most hispanics/latinos do) and the fact that Florida was under the governorship of George W Bush's brother Jeb, who in turn put Bush family loyalists in charge of running the 2000 election in Florida.
This meant that attempts to do a recount were blocked hard by the Florida establishment and the Democrats eventually had to go to the Supreme Court to force Florida to do a full recount, especially since the preliminary tally for the votes once voting ended, was leaning towards George W Bush.
Unfortunately for them, on a party line vote, the Conservative win of the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bush and ordered all recounting stopped. Bush II was basically made President and the Supreme Court had to include a cavet saying "this decision should NEVER be applied to another case similar to it!" to basically try and cover their asses due to certain SCJ (O'Connor) basically knowing that they were stealing the election for Bush and were effectively trying to do damage control.
This in turn is why people claim that Gore won the 2000 election and it was stolen from them by the GOP and Supreme Court.