ALLAHASSEE - In a crucial showdown, lawyers for Al Gore and George W. Bush dueled yesterday over whether a court should recount Florida ballots that could tip the outcome of the presidential election.
The vice president's lawyers argued in Leon County Circuit Court that some 14,000 ballots in predominantly Democratic Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties were never properly tallied, and should be hand-counted by a court-appointed master.
Bush's legal team fought back with a vengeance, attacking both the credibility and testimony of the Gore team's two witnesses, a voting analyst and a statistician. It called two witnesses of its own, and is expected to call more than a dozen more when the hearing resumes this morning.
While the issue at stake - who becomes the next president - was huge, the arguments focused on minutiae. The teams of lawyers spent hours discussing chad buildup, stylus points, and whether natural rubber is sturdier than synthetic rubber, technical issues that could affect whether a vote is counted.
Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court held an unusual Saturday session to review the Florida Supreme Court's ruling that allowed manual recounts of ballots. There was no indication when the justices will make a decision.
Gore spent a quiet day in Washington, taking out time for lunch with actor Tommy Lee Jones, a college roommate. Bush, meanwhile, was at his Texas ranch, where he said, ''I'm soon to be the president,'' before he met with Republican congressional leaders to discuss the agenda of a Bush administration.
All the while, a horde of lawyers was watching the clock, mindful that an extended trial could make Gore's challenge of the election moot. If the ballots cannot be counted by mid-December, both sides assume, Florida will send its 25 Bush electors to the Electoral College meeting on Dec. 18 and make Bush the 43d president. Republican leaders in the Legislature are making plans for a special session Wednesday to choose electors, but haven't made a final decision.
The underlying question in the Florida court debate was the intent of the voter, a principle heralded by the state Supreme Court on Nov. 21 when it gave Gore his only substantial court victory in the election challenge.
Gore's team is arguing that incompletely punched ballots should be tallied, because these ballots indicate voters' intent. The GOP lawyers, defending Secretary of State Katherine Harris's Nov. 26 certification of Bush as the winner by 537 votes, said dimpled and half-punched ballots are not valid.
''The certified results reject a number of legal votes and include a number of illegal votes,'' David Boies, Gore's lead attorney, told Judge N. Sanders Sauls. ''In an election contest, as long as they're legal votes, they've got to be considered.''
Bush's lead attorney, Barry Richard, laid out a legal argument for the complaints Bush supporters were chanting outside the courthouse: that Gore was seeking to circumvent a legitimate election by demanding ''unreasonable'' recounts of select ballots.
The Florida Legislature never ''intended to give the losing candidate three shots at the basket,'' Richard said, referring to the election night tally, the automatic recount in closely divided counties, and Gore's court contest.
In an interview afterward, Boies said the case pending in the US Supreme Court is not likely to affect Gore's challenge in Florida.
''Both sides understand that the contest will go forward regardless of how the US Supreme Court rules,'' Boies said.
Complicating the situation is the prospect of a special session of the Legislature. GOP lawmakers worry that if a Gore challenge drags past mid-December, Florida will lose its chance to send any electors.
But Republican leaders are also concerned that a special session could hurt the state's reputation, and are balking at calling a session while several court cases are pending.
In the court case argued yesterday, the Gore lawyers want a recount of about 10,700 ballots in Miami-Dade County they said were never caught by the machines, as well as about 3,300 disputed Palm Beach County ballots that were not completely punched through by voters. A lesser consideration is 51 votes from Nassau County, which certified its initial, machine-counted results, instead of its recounted results.
The first half of yesterday's session was devoted mainly to testimony by Gore witness Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services. Brace said that the voting machines were not always emptied of the chads, the small pieces of paper produced when a voter pokes a hole in a punch-card ballot with a stylus.
The ensuing ''chad buildup'' would explain why some ballots had only dimples and not holes for the choice of president, Brace said.
Further, Brace said, the rubber under the ballot softens with time, making it harder for a voter to complete a full hole punch.
Under aggressive cross-examination, Brace was attacked on what Bush attorney Phil Beck sarcastically called ''your theory of chad buildup.''
Might not a long-fingernailed voter dimple a chad? Beck asked. Perhaps a voter started to vote for Gore, then changed his mind, pulling back the stylus. Or maybe the voter started to vote, then decided neither presidential candidate was ''appealing,'' and withdrew his stylus, posited Joseph Klock, an attorney for the Florida secretary of state.
At the lawyers' demand, Brace emptied a voting machine of chads to display the difference between a chad-packed and a chad-free apparatus. Sauls, who had been watching with a mixture of fascination and impatience, looked on quizzically as Brace dumped out the tiny bits of paper.
''I'm actually putting chads all over your honor's counter,'' Brace said apologetically, drawing a chuckle from the courtroom.
Bush's lawyers also attacked Brace's credibility, suggesting that he was a partisan Democrat who was less a voting-machine expert than a demographer.
Brace appeared somewhat rattled by the cross-examination, but was adamant in his conclusion. ''When you have a close election, a manual recount is the only way to know how many votes were cast for each candidate,'' he said.
The Gore side also produced a Yale statistics professor, Nicholas Hengartner, who said the ''undervote'' in counties using punch-card ballots is substantially higher than those in counties that use an optical scanner system to count votes.
It is the 10,000 so-called undervotes, the ballots that were collected but did not show any vote at all for president, that the Gore campaign thinks could throw the advantage to the vice president.
Palm Beach County had a 2.2 percent undervote; punch-card ballots have an average 1.5 percent undervote, and optically scanned ballots a 0.3 percent rate, Hengartner said. The likelihood that that percentage of Palm Beach voters did not want to vote for president ''is less than winning the lottery,'' he said.
The Bush side may have found some encouragement when it called its first witness, Charles Burton, who headed Palm Beach County's canvassing board. Judge Sauls praised Burton, who had applied a strict standard in determining which dimpled ballots to count, as ''a great American.''
Separately, the Bush team filed papers yesterday challenging Gore's contesting of the election. The Bush side demanded that the ballots from Volusia and Broward counties, ''at a bare minimum,'' also be recounted. Further, it asked for an immediate judgment to secure election results in Seminole County, where Democrats are challenging absentee ballots.
Richard denied Democratic charges that he is stalling. ''It's not an issue,'' he said as he left the courtroom for a break. ''I want to go home tomorrow.''
