Vote-counting volunteers here and in two other Florida counties settled into their laborious work today mostly with an air of calm--leaving the partisan bickering for observers and the political parties' lawyers.

The election impasse approached the end of its second week with no clear end in sight. Frayed tempers yielded to stoicism or exhaustion among many of the election volunteers conducting hand recounts in the Democrat-dominated counties of Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade.

As Democrats defended the counts and the counters, Republicans evoked ominous visions of pre-holiday chad blizzards on counting room floors, illicit Scotch-taping of chads and even counters eating the tiny paper punch targets in the ballots.

"People are working very hard, and I don't think either party ought to be picking on people who are trying to do the right thing," said Palm Beach County Judge Charles E. Burton, a Democrat appointed by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R). "It's only the two parties that are saying there's chaos in there. . . . I just think it's outrageous and insulting."

The counters--often employees of their respective county governments--as well as the observers for the two parties are mostly volunteers. The observers, some of whom worked in presidential campaigns, have traveled from beyond the counties and even beyond the state.

"As far as the process is concerned, we are confident and comfortable with what we are doing, said counter Warren Forney, a volunteer who works for the Broward County Office of Environmental Services. "Anybody who could commit fraud in this environment should be a magician. There were isolated incidents at the beginning . . . but since then, things have fallen into place."

In Broward today, county officials--over the objections of Republicans--favored Democrats with a decision to include in the recount incompletely punched chads that they had excluded.

And a supervisor of the National Voter Registration Act announced to counters that stray chads could be brushed aside and onto the floor and that workers could keep ones that they found. Republicans jumped on this as further evidence of what they believe is how sloppily the recount is being carried out. A Broward County spokeswoman said the announcement did not reflect the policy of the canvassing board.

Also, Republicans have accused two Democratic counters of eating a chad, and have charged that several Democrats served as monitors one day and counters the next day.

In Miami-Dade County, election officials today took the first step toward a massive hand recount of more than 650,000 ballots beginning Monday morning. They cranked up the same machines that were used on Election Day and began sorting the punch-card ballots, separating those with clear punch holes from ones in which the chad was left dimpled or pregnant and read by the machines as a nonvote.

The move to cull out this "undervote"--estimated at almost 11,000--was designed to reduce the time required for the hand recount.

Republicans charged that running ballots through the machines again would further loosen chads and make it more difficult to get an accurate count.

Shortly before the sorting was to begin, Circuit Court Judge Margarita Esquiroz rejected an emergency request by supporters of Texas Gov. George W. Bush to stop the process.

During the mechanical sorting process, two observers from each party roamed the vote tabulation room taking notes as members of the news media watched through a glass picture window. Republicans said that what they witnessed there confirmed their fears. "Unfortunately, an hour into this, hundreds if not thousands of chads have fallen to the floor," said Rep. John Sweeney (R-N.Y.), an observer.

The mechanical sorting was being done, officials said, so that members of the official canvassing board--as opposed to the volunteer counters--would be the only ones to judge the questionable ballots.

Each time a machine stopped (about once for every 60 ballots), identifying an undervote in one of the county's 614 precincts, the workers put the ballot in question into an envelope to be given to the three-member board.

Meanwhile, 25 pairs of counters are to sort the other ballots into 10 piles for the 10 presidential candidates and an 11th pile for ballots with more than one vote per race, which do not count.

A court hearing on the recount is scheduled for Monday morning, according to county spokesman Mayco Villafana,

In Palm Beach, some of the Republican-Democrat pairs were exchanging details about their personal lives and jobs as they waited for each fresh set of ballots.

But the tensions remained evident. At one point, a Republican county employee working as a counter got up from her desk after her precinct had been tallied. "I've had it," she whispered to a reporter. "I'm not coming back. There are some real games going on here."

Republicans in Palm Beach County have demanded a recount slowdown after finding punch-card ballots with chads reaffixed with Scotch tape. One Republican observer, Elise Kenderian, said she saw a ballot Friday with the chad for Bush scotch-taped back on and a chad for Gore punched out.

"It was clear to me that the Bush hole had been voted and then a chad had been put back over the hole," she said. Two other Republican counters said they saw a total of four other ballots with the Bush chad removed, then taped back in place with a new punch for Gore.

However, Burton, the county judge, said the Republicans were making a public fuss outside over ballots they had not objected to inside during the recount. He said all the taped ballots he knew of were absentee ballots, and all were counted after review by GOP observers. It is not considered unusual, he said, for voters at home to poke a chad for the wrong candidate and tape over their mistake.

In Broward County, the canvassing board handed Democrats a potentially major procedural victory when the board agreed to include in its recount of 588,000 ballots those ballots that were not completely punched through.

The three-member board--two Democrats and a Republican--said that unless ordered to do otherwise by the Florida Supreme Court, it would review ballots that contain dimpled or pregnant chads in the presidential category.

An estimated 1,000 ballots bearing dimples and other demarcations have been placed in a separate pile since the outset of the hand recount in case they were needed. The board's chairman, County Judge Robert W. Lee, said this weekend that the majority of those ballots likely would go to Gore, who prevailed in Broward County by more than 2 to 1.

Officials said the board revised its position after receiving input from Andrew Meyers, who is the chief appellate counsel for the county scheduled to argue before the Supreme Court on Monday, and County Attorney Edward Dion.

Dion, a registered Republican, said today that the legal advice of the county, based in part on a court ruling last week in adjacent Palm Beach County, is that the two-corner chad standard is too restrictive and is consequently unlawful under Florida law.

The board also was compelled to consider changing its standard after discovering that more than 50 ballots in a row from two precincts had come in as undervotes, presumably due to mechanical problems with the balloting machines.

Republicans were incensed. "The numbers are not there for Gore, and they are now finding ways of changing the standard," Bush campaign spokesman Ray Sullivan said.

Interviews with more than a dozen counters revealed that notwithstanding the tedium and fatigue involved in the monumental and uncharted recount, the process appears to be grinding ahead in an orderly and honest manner.

"For me, the eyes are the biggest problem," said Larry Sampson, a bespectacled volunteer who works with the county department of motor vehicles. "I have checked out more than 1,000 ballots so far, and it can get tough and rough on you. But overall I think this is going smoothly and objectively."

Counters were given brief training, ranging from five to 20 minutes, by elections officials on what to look for while conducting the recount. Counters say they must sign in and out of the second-floor rooms they are working in--bathroom breaks included-- and are escorted in groups to the third-floor cafeteria for lunch.

But, said counter Kathleen Imhoff, "there are literally 25 people walking around each side of the room monitoring. All you have to do is raise your hand and a canvassing person will come and answer questions promptly."

Sawyer reported from Washington; Kovaleski from Broward County. Sue Anne Pressley in Miami, and Dan Eggen and George Lardner Jr. in Palm Beach, also contributed to this report.

DAY 12 AND COUNTING * Democrats asked the Florida Supreme Court to set a standard for deciding what voters really meant when they punched ballots. * Palm Beach and Broward counties continued their hand recounts. * Bush's lawyers asked the Florida Supreme Court to call an end to the presidential election recount and uphold the statutory deadline for counties to report their results.

POPULAR VOTE Bush: 49,657,511 Gore: 49,858,201--leads by 200,690 ELECTORAL VOTE Bush: 246 Gore: 260 Undecided: 32