By John Whitesides
    TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Nov 30 (Reuters) - Democrat Al Gore's
lawyers, citing a coming deadline for picking electors, pleaded
on Thursday for an immediate recount of disputed ballots they
believe will overturn certified results that gave Republican
George W. Bush a victory in the kingmaker state of Florida.
    In an emergency appeal to the Florida Supreme Court, the
lawyers said the recount must begin immediately in order to
finish by Dec. 12, the deadline for Florida to pick its
electors, the 25 delegates to the Electoral College that on
Dec. 18 will choose the next U.S. president. Both Bush and Gore
need Florida's electoral votes to win the White House.
    Leon County Circuit Judge N. Sanders Sauls, who is hearing
Gore's challenge of the Florida election results, set a hearing
on the vice president's challenge for Saturday, but had not
decided whether to order a recount.
    "The trial court has made it virtually impossible for the
will of the voters to be known before the deadline date
passes," Gore's lawyers wrote.
    They asked the state Supreme Court to order that the
counting begin as soon as Palm Beach County's ballots arrive in
Tallahassee on Thursday.
    "We're getting to the point where the count has to start if
all of the votes are going to be counted in a fair and accurate
way," Gore lawyer David Boies said at a news conference.
    Sauls ordered that all 1.1 million ballots cast in the Nov.
7 presidential election in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties
be sent to Tallahassee under police escort in case they were
needed. Miami-Dade planned to send its ballots on Friday.
    Gore sued to overturn Florida's certification of Bush as
the winner in Florida by 537 votes out of nearly 6 million
cast. His case centers on 14,000 "undervotes" from heavily
Democratic Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties, punch-card
ballots on which counting machines could not detect a vote for
president.
    Some had votes that could be detected by human eyes but
which were not included in the tally that gave Bush a 537-vote
lead in Florida. Gore hoped to pick up enough votes from a hand
recount of those ballots to overtake the Texas governor and
claim the White House.
 
    'REAL VOTES'
    Boies said the percentage of ballots with no
machine-readable vote for president was 3.5 times higher in
Florida counties that used punch-card ballots than in counties
that voted by other methods.
    "These are real votes. They just haven't been counted
because of the limitations of the punch-card ballot system," he
said. "There simply is no plausible explanation for why votes
in counties with punch-card ballots would be 350 percent more
likely not to vote for president."
    Gore's lawyers said only the 14,000 disputed ballots that
could not be machine-counted needed to be hand tallied. Bush's
lawyers have said that any hand recount should include all 1.1
million ballots from the two counties, a much more
time-consuming task.
    Boies predicted that either way, the election would end
soon.
    "We are getting close to the end. We are trying to focus on
the issues that we can resolve quickly and easily," he said. "I
believe this is going to be over on Dec. 12."
 ((--Miami newsroom, +1 305 374 5013))