ALLAHASSEE - With absentee ballots tripling George W. Bush's Florida lead over Al Gore to 930 votes, the Gore campaign yesterday filed its make-or-break legal case for including recounted votes, telling the Florida Supreme Court that ignoring retabulated ballots could mean ''the wrong candidate is being certified as the winner.''
At the same time, Bush campaign officials angrily accused Democrats of improperly throwing out overseas ballots and mishandling recounted ballots, and one county said it may not be done recounting until Dec. 1.
Bush had hoped to stage a victory celebration yesterday. With the tabulation of overseas ballots completed, Bush's 300-vote margin increased to 930. Bush would win without the recounted votes, but the Supreme Court has barred Secretary of State Katherine Harris from certifying the result as final, pending its review of the case.
That prompted Bush to cancel any victory statement, but his aides expressed hope that the Texas governor could still issue one within days.
''Florida's votes have now been counted and recounted, and in some areas recounted three or four times. And the overseas ballots have now been counted. All of those times and all of those counts show that Governor Bush and Secretary Cheney won the state of Florida,'' Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes said in Austin. ''We are hopeful that once the Supreme Court hears arguments in this case on Monday, the laws of Florida will prevail and the election will be certified.''
While the nation awaited a potentially decisive argument before the Supreme Court at 2 p.m. tomorrow, workers in three South Florida counties plowed ahead with the tedious but crucial work of recounting more than 1.6 million ballots by hand.
Yesterday, the Gore legal team filed a 48-page brief with the Florida Supreme Court, laying out the vice president's case that recounted votes should be included in the final tally. The brief included a harsh attack on Harris, a Republican supporter of Bush's, for trying to certify the election result before the recount is completed in three South Florida counties.
Harris's position, the Gore brief said, ''is an astounding one: It would reject ballots that are conceded to have been validly cast, and that were identified in a properly initiated and conducted recount, simply because they reached the secretary later than a deadline so short as to preclude the completion of the recounts.''
At another point, the legal brief said Harris's approach ''has been Kafkaesque: She has tried time and again to direct the counties to stop counting, and then, once those directives have been set aside by the court, she has sought to reject these votes because of the counties' failure in obedience to her directives to complete the counts on a timely basis.''
The Bush legal team is slated to file its response at the Supreme Court today. But yesterday, numerous Bush advocates left little doubt about the position of the Texas governor, making the rounds of television shows and the media-filled State House plaza to argue that Democrats were trying to take over the process and take away the election.
Bush aides said about 1,400 absentee ballots were unfairly rejected, charging that Democratic officials in some cases threw out ballots that did not have the proper postmark or envelope. The Bush campaign issued a statement from one of its most prominent supporters, retired general Norman Schwarzkopf, who said that many of the rejected ballots were from military personnel.
''It is a very sad day in our country when the men and women of the armed forces are serving abroad and facing danger ... [and] because of some technicality out of their control they are denied the right to vote for the president of the United States, who will be their commander in chief,'' Schwarzkopf said. The Desert Storm commander said that military personnel give their ballots to others, who are then supposed to properly mail them.
Gore spokesman Doug Hattaway dismissed the Republicans' litany of complaints, saying: ''Republicans are disparaging the process because they don't want the votes counted. It is unfortunate they are disparaging the public-minded citizens who are giving of their time.''
Separately, the Bush campaign charged that Democrats are mishandling ballots during the recounting process. Governor Marc Racicot of Montana, a Republican Bush supporter, delivered a stinging critique of the recount process to reporters at Bush's Austin campaign headquarters. Racicot said the recount workers had dropped and mishandled ballots, suggesting that Gore was unfairly gaining votes.
But, with less fanfare, the Bush camp also is preparing for the possibility that the Florida Supreme Court will rule against it. In that case, the campaign may lodge protests with local canvassing boards and file lawsuits that would contend the recount was conducted illegally, according to Bush associates, including Racicot.
Thus, it was possible that the election struggle would continue even if the Supreme Court sides with Gore and the vice president takes the lead in the vote count.
The legal jousting in Tallahassee occurred on a day when most people in this region of Florida were focused on one of the biggest sporting events here in years, the football face-off last night between two top-ranked teams, the local favorite Florida State and archrival University of Florida from Gainesville. With the town filled with tens of thousands of football fans and perhaps 1,000 members of the media, and satellite trucks ringing both the stately Supreme Court and the packed Doak Campbell Stadium, the confluence of events gave new meaning to the phrase ''political football.''
In South Florida, meanwhile, the counting continued.
It is not yet clear whether Gore will pick up enough votes to overcome Bush's 930-vote lead, but Democrats were confident that the vice president could do that after votes are counted in the three heavily Democratic counties where recounts are underway or about to begin: Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade.
In Palm Beach County, Democratic observers sparred with their Republican counterparts and charged the GOP monitors with delaying the counting process by automatically objecting to every sixth vote for Gore.
Republicans denied the charges, but they drew a warning early in the morning from the head of the county's elections canvassing board, Judge Charles Burton, a Democrat.
''I'm getting frustrated that they're not making reasonable calls,'' he said.
The Republican monitors had disputed more than half the votes in many precincts, he said, and might be thrown out if it became clear they were trying to delay the count. Afterward, upon the canvassing board's examination, Burton said most of the votes were clearly punched and prompted few objections from Republican lawyers.
Republican observers, however, said the ultimate count would be unreliable because of mishandled ballots.
In one case, Republican observers alleged several ballots had chads, the small flecks of cardboard, taped into punch holes. Burton, however, said the votes in question were absentee ballots that had been approved by Republican lawyers. Apparently, a few voters had fixed their ballots after making a mistake, he said.
''For them to say that the process is flawed is ridiculous,'' said Denise Cote, a spokeswoman for Palm Beach County. ''We can't control how people send us absentee ballots. We can get them with coffee on them or Scotch tape on them; it's not under our control.''
The bickering subsided in the afternoon and the county reported counting more than 105,000 of the more than 462,000 votes. By midnight, a spokeswoman said, she expected counters would complete tabulating 32 percent of the county's vote. She did not release the candidates' tallies.
Burton, who has slept less than four hours a night in the past week and a half, said he wasn't sure the count would finish by Thanksgiving.
In Broward County, where elections workers are counting some 588,000 votes by hand, Republicans expressed concern about a report in The Miami Herald that at least 39 felons cast absentee ballots in Broward and Miami-Dade counties. The majority of the felons, who are barred from voting by Florida law, were Democrats, according to the newspaper.
Meanwhile, with 162 of Broward's 609 precincts counted by midafternoon, Gore had gained 53 votes over official tallies sent to the secretary of state on Tuesday.
Bush campaign officials planned to ask the canvassing board to investigate and disqualify the votes cast by felons. Bush advisers also said they might ask a judge to stop the hand count until the investigation is complete.
A hand recount in Miami-Dade, Florida's most populous county with 654,000 votes, is set to begin tomorrow, with a goal of finishing by Dec. 1. Counters will use their judgment to determine voter intent, without categorically excluding any ballots.
Today, Miami-Dade will use a machine to cull the so-called ''undervotes,'' about 10,700 ballots in which the machine registered no presidential vote. The county's three-member canvassing board will examine those ballots first to determine whether the machine missed any votes.
On Friday, the Miami-Dade board reversed a decision made just three days earlier not to recount the votes. The hand counts in the three South Florida counties represent more than 1.7 million of almost 6 million votes cast on Nov. 7.
Kranish reported from Tallahassee, Abel from Palm Beach County.
