s last week's tally in Florida's flawed election eroded George W. Bush's lead to just 327 - and Bush saw his chances of becoming the 43d president getting slimmer by the hour - he began to look more like a boxer who, losing badly in the late rounds, demands that his opponent quit now so he can be declared the winner.
The Bush camp wants Al Gore to accept the unofficial recount now, rather than wait for the overseas ballots to be counted, which are not expected to be certified until Friday. After all, they say, the overseas ballots are likely to be mostly Republican votes, as they were in the 1996 election.
But if Bush and his advisers are as confident as they appear, then they should be willing to wait until Friday for those ballots to be officially counted.
Perhaps Republicans are not so confident as they want us to believe. They may well be nervously pondering the possibility that the overseas ballots, which include those from armed services personnel, who tend to vote Republican, might also include black and Hispanic voters who support Gore, as well as a number of Jews sending in ballots from Israel who back the Gore-Lieberman ticket.
Of course, if a majority of these overseas ballots prove to be Bush votes, the Republicans can, after a sigh of relief, argue that the election is officially over and that Gore should acknowledge that Bush is president-elect.
But that is not likely to happen, with so many reports of voter irregularities, the use of a faulty, if not illegal, ballot in Palm Beach County, and other problems that almost surely cost Gore votes that would have given him victory.
Republicans' claim that a Democratic official approved the confusing Palm Beach ballot before it was used is irrelevant. The Democrats are not charging that the ballot was deliberately designed to be misleading. Rather, they say the ballot simply proved to be confusing enough to have 19,000 ballots thrown out in Palm Beach County.
If these ballots had been counted, perhaps the networks that projected Gore the winner the first time would have been right after all. The exit polls no doubt reflected the intent of the voters who cast them - and the intent, more often than not, was a vote for Gore.
Short of holding another election in Palm Beach County, there may be another remedy to the confusion: the hand counting of ballots cast in four counties. The Gore team rightfully requested that count, and some election officials have agreed. A hand count is particularly relevant after Bush lost more than 1,400 of a nearly 1,800-vote lead in the first recount.
And there is the possibility that Palm Beach's so-called ''butterfly'' (for its shape) ballot, even though it met the approval of both Republicans and Democrats, might be declared illegal. At the very least, it was apparently very confusing to thousands of voters who used it for the first time in Palm Beach County.
There is no way, for example, that Reform Party candidate Patrick Buchanan - not known as a friend to Jewish and black voters - received some 3,200 votes in the largely Jewish and black areas of Palm Beach. Even Buchanan says some of his vote probably should have gone to Gore.
There is a decent chance that Gore will still win this election after a hand count of the ballots in the four involved counties is completed. It is reported that thousands of ballots were not counted simply because the machines did not consider them punched by the voters. One theory holds that these ballots were punched (at least partially) but that the holes were obscured as the ballots were fed through the machines, and thus did not register in the count. In these heavily Democratic areas, these ballots may turn out to be, upon manual inspection, Gore votes.
This concern may account for the Bush camp's desire to declare victory as soon as possible. They know that if a machine recount can unofficially reduce Bush's lead from nearly 1,800 votes to less than 330, there is no telling what a visual inspection of hand-counted ballots might find.
The Bush team has been claiming that Gore's team is simply trying to drag this election out until they get some results that work for them. Gore's team, on the other hand, argues that the Bush team is rushing to judgment, claiming victory prematurely.
Perhaps the best way to bring this battle to an end, even before the Electoral College meets on Dec. 18, is to have both sides abide by an official hand count of the four involved counties and the official overseas vote count. Once the results are in, the matter should be over.
If Gore loses, he can walk away knowing that he got the popular vote, and that Bush is, at the very least, a disputed president.
And if Gore wins, Bush might do well to remind himself of what he has been saying to Gore: Don't drag it out. Concede the election. And accept the will of the voters.
Robert A. Jordan is a Globe columnist.
