Besides continuing court challenges in Florida from both sides, the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday will hear Bush's case against a Florida state Supreme Court decision that allowed hand recounts to continue.

Lieberman did not specify the reasons for Gore's contest of the election, but lead Gore lawyer David Boies said it would be based on at least three grounds, all involving incomplete recounting or votes he said had been tallied for the vice president at some point and later discounted.

The Gore campaign will challenge the Palm Beach board's recounting method in court today, complaining they used too stringent a standard to determine which votes were valid.

Boies told press assembled in Tallahassee that Gore will also contest

certification because of the decision last Wednesday by Miami-Dade County canvassers to drop their recount and because ballots that had been judged to be for the vice president there and in Nassau County were subsequently subtracted from his total.

Gore is expected to outline his reasons for his contest of the election in a speech today.

Yesterday, with time running out before the 5 p.m. deadline for submitting final vote tallies to Harris' office, Palm Beach remained 800 to 1,000 ballots short of finishing its hand recount. The Palm Beach canvassing board then requested that Harris include its partial recount in her final tally, but Harris denied the request. The partial recount would have given Gore a net gain of 180 votes.

Board members had met in round-the-clock sessions the since early Saturday morning in hopes of completing a re-canvass of 14,500 questionable ballots, but simply ran out of time.