ALLAHASSEE - Defiantly insisting that Al Gore is the real winner of the presidential race, the vice president's lawyers yesterday took their case back to court, contesting official results that would make Governor George W. Bush of Texas the nation's 43d president.
The Gore campaign cobbled together a series of uncounted and allegedly miscounted votes in three counties, concluding in court papers that Gore had actually won Florida by a handful of votes.
''The number of'' disputed ''votes is more than sufficient to place in doubt, indeed to change, the result of the election,'' said papers filed yesterday with the Leon County Circuit Court.
As the election stretched into its fourth week, there appeared no immediate end to the battle for the White House. Several courts are considering challenges to the election, and despite GOP appeals for Gore to bow out, the vice president is showing no signs of backing down.
After a hastily arranged hearing with the lawyers for both sides, Tallahassee Circuit Court Judge N. Sanders Sauls put the Bush and Gore attorneys on a strict schedule to resolve the contest, underscoring the Dec. 12 deadline to name Florida's 25 representatives to the Electoral College.
The vice president's lawyers have until tomorrow to come up with a list of witnesses and to itemize their evidence, a task Gore attorney Dexter Douglass said would almost certainly be completed by today. The Bush side would then have two days following submission of the Gore papers to file its own response to the vice president's challenge.
The case threatens to run right up against the Dec. 12 deadline. Any fact-finding - which could include a court-ordered recount of some 14,000 ballots - would take considerable time. A full-fledged trial would take additional time.
But ''we will'' meet the deadline, ''if the other side cooperates,'' Douglass said after the hearing.
Bush lawyer Barry Richard called the Gore camp's demands for a court-supervised count unconstitutional and ''without legal authority.''
The court cannot recount Florida's ballots or order a new election, Richard said.
''As far as the US Constitution and Congress are concerned, you don't even need to have an election to select electors'' to the Electoral College, Richard said after the hearing. He referred to legal provisions that enable the state Legislature, when necessary, to vote to appoint the electors.
While Bush prepared his transition to the White House, Gore and other Democrats worked to shake the public impression that Bush, at long last, was the winner.
Republicans went about their business as if Bush were indisputably the president-elect. Senate majority leader Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, called for hearings in early January to confirm Bush's Cabinet appointees.
But the Democrats continued to press their case, both in court and among the electorate.
The Clinton White House, which has generally avoided getting drawn into the election fight, is not cooperating with Bush's efforts to get his transition in motion.
''We're on track to provide that information to either candidate or both candidates, if that becomes necessary,'' White House spokesman Jake Siewert said in Washington. But Bush would not be getting president-elect treatment just yet, he said. Bush has been denied so far the $5.3 million in federal transition funds.
Senate minority leader Thomas Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota, and House minority leader Richard Gephardt, Democrat of Missouri, traveled to Tallahassee yesterday to show their support for Gore - support they insisted was shared by the Democratic caucuses.
''Thousands of votes have not been counted, or they have been counted and ignored,'' Gephardt said.
''You take all the votes, and the vice president comes out ahead,'' Daschle added.
To emphasize their point, the two Democratic leaders broadcast a conference call they had with Gore and his running mate, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut.
''Wouldn't it be a terrible thing for the country to find out a month or two months from now ... that you also had the most votes in Florida and should have won the election?'' Gephardt asked Gore, who did not sound surprised by the rhetorical question.
Daschle and Gephardt posited that an ''academic'' or ''professor'' might file a Freedom of Information Act request for the disputed ballots, learning too late for Gore that he was the true winner.
What the Gore campaign wants is for the court to take thousands of ballots to Leon County and count them - an undertaking Gore lawyer David Boies acknowledged in court would be ''an unappetizing'' task. Sauls put that question aside for now.
The campaign asked the court to accept the recounted votes in Palm Beach County, which would add 215 ballots to Gore's tally, and to count the 157 Gore votes identified in the suspended recount in Miami-Dade County.
Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who certified Bush as the winner of Florida's 25 electoral votes on Sunday, refused to consider those two groups of ballots.
The Gore camp also wants Sauls to disallow 174 overseas votes statewide. The votes had initially been declared ''illegal,'' said Gore spokesman Doug Hattaway, but county canvassing boards later decided to count them anyway.
If just those requests were allowed, Gore would eke out a nine-vote advantage over Bush, Gore aides said.
Furthermore, the Gore campaign seeks to count about 4,000 ballots in Palm Beach County, votes the county canvassers disallowed for not showing a clearly marked vote, as well as approximately 9,000 ballots in Miami-Dade that did not show any choice for president when the ballots were run through the machine on election night.
Democratic observers in Palm Beach told the campaign the vice president would pick up at least 800 votes there if ballots with ''dimpled'' marks were counted, Hattaway said. The difference, taken in the context of this exceedingly close election, would give Gore an imposing lead.
Meanwhile, a separate lawsuit sought to upset Bush's certified lead. Filed by a Democratic voter in Seminole County, the suit demands that 15,000 absentee ballots in that heavily-Republican county be thrown out because Republican officials were allowed to fix errors on some absentee ballot requests.
The case was transferred yesterday to the state court in Tallahassee handling other presidential election challenges. It is not part of the Gore campaign's case.
