In Broward County, the manual recount ended just minutes before midnight on Saturday, producing a net gain of 567 votes for Mr. Gore, cutting Mr. Bush's previous lead in half and bringing the vice president within striking distance of overtaking him, depending on the Palm Beach count. A partial recount in Miami-Dade County last week had produced an additional 157 votes for Mr. Gore. But officials there abruptly stopped their recount last week, saying they could not finish a full recount by today's deadline, and those votes were not included in the new totals issued tonight.

But they will be at the center of the Gore campaign's legal challenges under Florida law, which allows a loser to file a formal contest of election results once they are certified.

Tonight, a senior lawyer for Mr. Bush said he could not cite a specific statute requiring that manual recounts include all of a county's votes, but that partial hand counts were wrong in principle because they did not weigh everyone's vote the same.

Mr. Bush's chief representative here, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, held a news conference tonight to declare: ''At some point -- at some point -- there must be closure. At some point, the law must prevail and the lawyers must go home. We have reached that point.''

Mr. Gore's lead lawyer, David Boies, said this afternoon that his campaign would file contests at least in Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Nassau Counties. In Nassau, officials decided last week to use the original Nov. 7 vote tally instead of the results of a mandatory machine recount that apparently missed some 200 presidential ballots. That switch in policy produced a net gain of 51 votes for Mr. Bush.

Mr. Boies denounced what he called Nassau County's ''inexplicable actions.'' At a minimum, he suggested, the Gore campaign would seek to have the 157 votes from the partially completed recount in Miami-Dade included in the final tally, and to have some 10,000 ballots in that county that never registered any choice for president when counted by machine examined to see if voters' intent could be determined.

Mr. Boies also said the campaign believed all the recounts that Palm Beach was able to complete before today's deadline should have been included in the tally, noting that the tallies on file already included the results of sample recounts conducted in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade Counties to determine if a full manual recount was warranted.