Gore awaits final, final countdown

Election showdown DEMOCRAT Al Gore's legal challenge to Florida's presidential election tally opened yesterday, with his attorneys pushing for a quick recount of about 14,000 disputed ballots that could decide the next occupant of the White House.

An army of lawyers representing Gore, Republican George W Bush, state and local officials and Florida voters gathered in a cramped third-floor courtroom of the Leon County Courthouse, where more than 1.1 million ballots from two counties are under guard in storage vaults. The attorneys completed brief general opening arguments yesterday and began to enter evidence, with the Gore team moving to enter more than 40 batches of documents, ballots and depositions. Most of the morning session was taken up by Kimball Brace, a witness called by Gore's lawyers who is an expert on the punch-card voting machines at the heart of the dispute. His testimony focused on the arcane properties of chads and the effect of "chad buildup" in the voting machines on registering votes.

Facing a December 12 deadline for selection of the state's 25 Electoral College votes, Gore has challenged Florida's certification of Bush as the winner and hopes a speedy recount of the 14,000 disputed ballots will provide him the votes to erase Bush's 537-vote margin of victory.

"The certified results reject a number of legal votes and include a number of illegal votes," David Boies, Gore's lead attorney, argued to Judge N Sanders Sauls.

But Republican attorneys argued that Gore could not "hand-pick" which counties' ballots to recount and endlessly recount them until they hit a winning number. Bush attorney Barry Richard said Gore's arguments were "unreasonable and contrary to Florida law".

If the Gore team's approach was applied, he said, "we might as well take all the ballots on election night and ship them to Tallahassee for a judge to start counting".

The Florida court session comes a day after the US Supreme Court waded into a presidential election for the first time in history, quizzing lawyers about whether the Florida Supreme Court exceeded its authority in a ruling two weeks ago that extended the deadline for recounting presidential votes by hand in Florida. Because of that ruling, Bush's lead in Florida fell to 537 votes from 930. If the Supreme Court finds for Bush, the previous result will be reinstated, making Gore's task of overtaking his rival and achieving victory much tougher.

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