ALLAHASSEE - The evidence was incontrovertible: The Bush and Gore campaigns had retained almost too many lawyers to fit in one courtroom.
Even before opening statements yesterday, suits had run out of seats. Around its assigned table, Bush's legal team knocked knees. Gore's lawyers rubbed elbows unintentionally at theirs. Others milled about, looking uncertain about where to plop down their pinstripes and white shirts.
The jury box was already crowded with journalists and observers. The dark wood benches were shoulder-to-shoulder. Only Charles Burton, the Palm Beach judge whose ballot recount got discounted, had ample room. Waiting to testify, he sat in the hallway hoping he could make the early flight home.
Forget the winter carnival, which saw the capitol's mossy oak trees lit up with 200,000 lights last night. The hottest ticket in Tallahassee was for the third-floor courtroom where Judge N. Sanders Sauls of Leon County presides, where witnesses tried to hold their own against some of the best litigators in the land, and where onlookers tried to stay alert during what TV commentators kept referring to as the historic showdown.
History tends to unfold slowly, though, and yesterday's hearing was no exception. The pace was often excruciating, more an amble than a race for the presidency. Just one witness, an election data consultant who never went with a ''yes'' or ''no'' answer when a long-winded one would do, had taken the stand by the lunch break.
Next up was a statistician, out to prove with mind-numbing hypotheticals and postdoctoral-level calculations that the math favored Al Gore.
''We have a very limited amount of time here, Judge,'' one of the vice president's lawyers complained when one of George W. Bush's lawyers objected, yet again, not to the tedium but to a witness's claim to expertise.
Later, another of the Texas governor's lawyers observed that ''human beings get tired, lose attention and don't do as good a job ... Inattentiveness sets in.''
He, too, was referring to testimony on, or perhaps more accurately testifying to, the Bush team's opinion of the ballot recounts that were at the center of the hearing. The Gore campaign wants the ballots counted by hand, and they want that to happen now. The Bush campaign wants to keep last week's certified vote, which would send the Texas governor to the White House.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of disputed ballots remain under lock and key in Tallahassee, after they were trucked in from South Florida.
As they did in Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, and Broward Counties, both campaigns took to the hallways during the breaks, spinning testimony and asserting their expectations of triumph.
Playing a complicated hand in a variety of courts, Gore needs an immediate win much more than Bush does. Yesterday, Gore lawyers complained that the Bush team knew what testimony was coming, and was trying simply to delay a decision that could force an immediate ballot count, or recount, or recount of a recount.
''If he knew about everything, he wouldn't be a human being,'' a Gore lawyer, Steve Zach, said of the election consultant whose credentials had been questioned by the Bush lawyers.
For his part, the consultant, Kimball Brace of Election Data Services, said he ''felt fine'' on the witness stand, ready for hostile cross-examination after testifying in court more than 40 times over the years. Brace also had a hand in the morning's one moment of drama, when a polling machine from Palm Beach County was opened to reveal ... chad buildup, meaning it was clogged with the little squares of paper that voters had punched out to record their election choices.
The Gore camp argues that those chads, among other things, prevented a full and fair vote from being cast Nov. 7 and tallied afterward in several Florida counties. Bush lawyers argue otherwise, and have asked the US Supreme Court to intervene.
The Florida Supreme Court also has more rulings to go, as does another circuit court judge in Tallahassee. The state Legislature has gotten involved, too, by calling a special session to debate whether to circumvent the dispute by sending its own Bush slate to the Electoral College.
''It's almost certain that if the Republicans push ahead with everything they have, Bush is going to win,'' said Lance deHaven-Smith, a political scientist with the Florida Institute of Government in Tallahassee. ''Look at how many ways Gore could lose. He could lose even if he wins in the US Supreme Court and the Florida Supreme Court if the Florida Legislature says it's going ahead with its own slate. He's got a tough fight in all these courts.''
Still, even in the somber courtroom chaired by Sauls, there were chuckles, especially when the judge offered jokes. Then the lawyers couldn't laugh hard or fast enough.
Burton, the Palm Beach circuit court judge, insisted that he had remained impartial during the recount and planned on maintaining that stance in court. At least his testimony was in plain English, no numbers, no need to establish his authority.
He was even glad to give Americans a lesson about the electoral process. Only about half of all eligible voters bothered to cast a ballot, and tens of thousands who did, miscast them in Florida. The result, in part, was yesterday's hearing.
''People keep talking about the solemnity of the process and the importance of each vote, but they go in and just want to get out,'' Burton said as he waited for his late-afternoon testimony to begin.
''They don't read the instructions. They don't ask for help. They should've said they needed a new ballot. I'm not blaming the voters, but it would be nice if some voter somewhere stood up and took a little responsibility.''
