Connecticut Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, appears on NBC's "Meet the Press" on a television monitor in the background as Broward County election workers hand-count ballots. As the campaigns of Vice President Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush girded for a showdown before the Florida Supreme Court today, the tedious task of hand-counting ballots continued in two Florida counties yesterday amid a blizzard of legal papers and heated bickering between partisans of the two presidential campaigns.

Lawyers for Bush and Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris filed briefs with the Supreme Court, arguing that Harris is required by Florida law to reject new vote tallies from manual recounts that were not completed within seven days of the Nov. 7 election.

"It would be highly inequitable to keep the state and the nation on hold to finish a manual recount when the responsible officials failed expeditiously even to begin the process," the Bush lawyers wrote.

A short time later, Gore's lawyers filed another brief with the state's highest court, asking the justices to establish a generous standard by which to determine voters' intent when they punched ballots in the disputed presidential election.

"For more than 80 years, it has been settled Florida law that a ballot must be counted if the voter's intent is apparent from an examination of the ballot," the Gore brief said.

Twelve days after Election Day, one of the closest presidential elections in American history still hung in the balance, with no clear path to a resolution of the deadlock created from the collective judgment of a deeply divided electorate. Gore's running mate, Connecticut Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, took to the Sunday morning television interview programs, followed closely by Bush's friend and designated post-election spokesman, Montana Gov. Marc Racicot (R).

As the rival campaigns used the airwaves to fight for a public relations advantage in the bitter dispute, their loyal troops fought it out in the trenches in the county courthouses of South Florida, arguing about fallen and missing chads and the treatment of overseas absentee ballots, particularly from military personnel who vote in Florida.

As of last night, Bush clung to a narrow 930-vote lead over Gore in Florida, with the vice president's hope of overtaking his Republican rival resting on the outcome of a manual recount of ballots that continued yesterday in Broward and Palm Beach counties and was set to begin today in Miami-Dade County. To win Florida's 25 electoral votes, and with them the presidency, Gore must also prevail before the state Supreme Court, which he has asked to overturn a lower court judge's ruling that Harris acted within her discretion when she decided to exclude the results of the manual recounts from her official certification of statewide election results.

The Supreme Court, which last week blocked Harris from issuing a final certification of election returns, has scheduled oral arguments in the case this afternoon. In public comments yesterday, representatives of both sides were careful not to rule out taking additional legal steps if their nominee loses the Florida legal battle. But both sides also recognize that the state Supreme Court decision has the potential to be the decisive point in determining the outcome of the presidential election.

"I believe it will end here," a senior Gore legal adviser said of the expected Supreme Court ruling.

Throughout heavily Democratic South Florida, where the manual recounts are taking place, tempers continued to fray yesterday. In Broward County, Republicans accused the local elections canvassing board of bowing to pressure from the Democrats when it decided to adopt a more liberal standard in deciding which ballots to include in the final tally.

The board had been excluding any ballots that did not have at least two corners poked out of the chad--the tiny paper spot on a punch card ballot where voters punch their vote. But yesterday, after a lawyer who is advising them warned that the two-corner standard would not stand up in court, board members decided also to consider so-called pregnant chads, dimpled chads and other markings indicating a voter's intent.

"The Gore campaign now wants to lower the bar because it needs more votes," fumed Ed Pozzuoli, chairman of the Broward County GOP.

"These chad marks didn't get on the ballot by osmosis," replied Charles Lichtman, a Democratic lawyer in the county.

By 11 p.m., when election officials recessed the count with 428 of Broward County's 609 precincts finished, Gore had gained 108 votes over the tally county officials submitted to Harris's office last Tuesday.

Miami-Dade, Florida's most populous county, is set to begin the massive task of manually recounting 650,000 ballots at 8 a.m. today and is not expected to complete the recount until Dec. 1. Yesterday, in an early morning conference call, Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Margarita Esquiroz rejected a Republican request to halt a preliminary step in the process--another machine recount yesterday of the ballots to separate out those without a machine-detectable vote for president.

Republicans argued that another machine recount would further "degrade" the ballots, loosening chads and making it more difficult to get an accurate count. Esquiroz rejected that argument, but scheduled a hearing on the recount process for today, according to Miami-Dade spokeswoman Mayco Villafana.

In yesterday's machine recount, each time a computer used to count votes stopped, identifying a ballot without a discernible vote for president, workers put the ballot in question into an envelope and inserted a bright-pink ballot in its place to mark the spot in the precinct stack. On average, the computers were stopping after every 61 ballots.

The ballots collected in the envelopes will be given to the three-member county canvassing board today so it can begin to determine, if possible, who the vote was intended for.

There was also a minor fracas in Palm Beach County when a volunteer counting ballots accidentally put a ballot in the wrong stack. "You would have thought she'd killed 14 people," said County Judge Charles E. Burton, who is supervising the recount process.

Results released yesterday in Palm Beach County after about a third of the ballots were recounted showed that Bush had picked up 12 votes on Gore in the heavily Democratic area.

Bush's overall lead in Florida swelled from 300 to 930 votes because of the tabulation over the weekend of overseas absentee ballots, many of them from military personnel. Republicans yesterday continued to accuse the Gore campaign of systematically attempting to exclude military votes from the absentee count.

Asked on NBC-TV's "Meet the Press" about a memo written by a Democratic lawyer about how overseas absentee ballots could be invalidated, Lieberman said, "This was a memo that was setting out the law for monitors associated with the Democratic Party who were going to be at each of these counties as the ballots were cast. . . . The decision was made by the local election officials, and I presume that the local election officials were calling it real close because of all the focus on every vote in Florida as this recount goes on.

"Let me just say that the vice president and I would never authorize, and would not tolerate, a campaign that was aimed specifically at invalidating absentee ballots from members of our armed services," Lieberman added. "And I've been assured that there were more absentee ballots from non-military voters overseas that were ultimately disqualified."

Lieberman said he would also urge local Florida elections officials "to go back and take another look" at disqualified ballots from military personnel.

About 40 percent of the more than 3,500 overseas absentee ballots that arrived in Florida in the 10 days after Election Day were thrown out. Frequent reasons, according to local elections officials, were an absent postmark or failure to have the ballot signed by a witness. Officials in Broward County rejected 304 overseas absentee ballots, including 119 that were postmarked after Election Day and 64 domestic absentee ballots that had been included with the ones from overseas.

There were sharply different versions yesterday of how the overseas absentee ballots were handled. Rick Mullaney, the general counsel for the city of Jacksonville and a member of the all-GOP Duval County canvassing commission, said that the county's supervisor of elections disqualified 64 overseas ballots. The biggest problem was that 44 lacked a postmark. The county considered the GOP's argument that those should be included, but decided that the law did not allow for that, Mullaney said.

Then, Mullaney said, he listened to three lawyers for the Gore-Lieberman campaign who sought to have an additional 147 ballots thrown out, arguing that the signatures, postmark or witness's signature were problematic. In the end, the county upheld only 10 of those protests.

"There is no question that this was a scorched-earth campaign to keep out as many military votes as possible," Mullaney said. "It was like watching a criminal defense lawyer try to toss out the confession of a guilty man."

But Bob Rackleff, a Democrat, a retired naval reserve officer and a member of the Leon County canvassing commission, disagreed. "They are trying to make a big issue of this, but I can only say that when we went through these ballots, we were very careful and very even-handed," he said.

Lieberman was followed through much of the Sunday talk show circuit by Racicot. Appearing on "Fox News Sunday," Racicot held up a plastic bag that he said contained 283 chads from Broward County that had fallen off ballots.

"Now what that means, of course, is if you replicate that throughout these entire four counties, God only knows how many ballots have been altered in some fashion, either falling apart, or because of movement, or because of normal recounts or because of the manual recounts," he said.

Staff writers Mike Allen in Austin, Sue Anne Pressley in Miami, Serge F. Kovaleski in Plantation, Fla., and Jo Becker in Tallahassee contributed to this report.