EST PALM BEACH, Fla. - The efforts underway to manually recount about 1.7 million ballots in three South Florida counties have so far netted Vice President Al Gore no significant gains.
While courts wrangle over the legality of a hand recount and with little more than one-third of the 1.7 million ballots counted, Gore had gained only 166 votes by last night. To beat his Republican rival, Governor George W. Bush of Texas, Gore would need at least 931.
Two-thirds of the precincts in Broward County and about one-sixth of those in Palm Beach County have reported the results of their hand counts. Miami-Dade County began its hand recount yesterday, and had released results from only a few precincts.
Miami-Dade, Florida's largest county with more than 654,000 votes, is viewed as the wild card.
''In Dade, anything goes,'' said Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa. ''The county has a history of voting irregularities. It's one place I would not like to hazard a guess about. Certainly, it's an uphill battle for Gore, but neither side should count their chickens before they hatch on this one.''
Miami-Dade County, which is almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, has a history rife with electoral turmoil. Yesterday, Republicans took the offensive and accused the county's canvassing board of ''manufacturing'' votes for Gore and said the manual recount process is subject to tampering. They also filed a second lawsuit in Miami, asking a circuit court judge to suspend the recount there.
Attorneys for Gore, who won the county by 39,272 votes, dismissed the allegations as political desperation and a bid to discredit the hand recount. They noted Republicans are both counting and observing every ballot.
''The Republicans are launching an unprecedented smear campaign,'' said Kendall Coffey, a Gore lawyer observing the Miami-Dade recount. ''But anyone watching can tell that the various accusations are nothing more than baseless posturing.''
Despite the low numbers so far, Democrats are holding out hope that more than 27,000 ''undervotes'' - ballots in which machines didn't register a vote for president - in the three counties will be the key to shifting the balance in favor of Gore. They also believe Gore will benefit from a decision by Broward's canvassing board Sunday to accept ''dimpled chads,'' punch-card ballots where the holes are partially perforated but not detached.
In Palm Beach County, residents angry over the now notorious ''butterfly'' ballot lost a long-shot battle in circuit court here when Judge Jorge Labarga ruled that he does not have the authority to order a re-vote in the county, even if the ballot design cost Gore the votes that could have won him the presidency.
Thousands of voters throughout the county have signed sworn statements saying the confusing ballot led them to cast their vote for the conservative Reform Party candidate Patrick J. Buchanan instead of for Gore.
''Given the uniqueness of presidential elections and the undue advantage a re-vote or new election may afford one candidate over the other(s),'' Labarga wrote in a 17-page decision, ''it was the clear and unambiguous intention of the framers of the Constitution of the United States that presidential elections be held on a single day.''
Lawyers for the Gore voters quickly filed an appeal and said they believe Labarga misread Florida law.
''He believes Florida judges can do nothing to remedy a flawed presidential election,'' said attorney Henry Handler, who represented a West Palm Beach chiropractor. ''He was wrong. He has the power. What would happen if it there was a hurricane, fraud, [or] the voters' will was obviously not represented by the results of an election?''
The Gore campaign did win a legal victory yesterday in Seminole County, where a judge refused to block a lawsuit challenging 4,700 absentee ballots. Democrats have accused local GOP election officials there of bending the rules to allow invalid ballots to be counted in the predominantly Republican county. That court scheduled a hearing for next week.
At the emergency operations center in Palm Beach County, election officials said they had finished tallying about half of the county's 462,000 votes. Denise Cote, a county spokeswoman, said Gore had a net gain of 3 votes with 103 out of 531 precincts reporting.
At the hurricane shelter in Broward County, 544 of the county's 607 precincts had been recounted by late yesterday afternoon, and Gore had gained a net 117 votes over last week's official tallies.
In an unexpected development, election supervisor Jane Carroll, the only Republican on the county's three-member canvassing board, announced yesterday that she was quitting, effective immediately. Carroll, who also serves as county election supervisor, was quickly replaced by Circuit Judge Robert Rosenberg. His political affiliation could not immediately be determined.
''I've given this a lot of thought,'' Carroll, 70, told reporters in a news conference. ''Physically I cannot continue 15-hour days. I have to think of my health.''
In Miami-Dade County, Gore picked up 46 votes after 67 of 614 precincts were counted. Election officials also reviewed about 10,750 undervotes, which were separated by machine on Sunday. Officials did not release the results of those votes.
With the county unlikely to finish its hand count until December, the election of the next president may hinge on Miami-Dade.
''Any time you have an election resting on Miami-Dade county, you should be worried,'' said MacManus.
