Vice-President Al Gore has appealed for emergency recounts in Florida with public opinion turning against him as he seeks to strip Governor George Bush of his win in Florida by court action.
The shift against Mr Gore has followed the official declaration last Sunday that Mr Bush had won Florida and its 25 electoral college votes by a margin of 537 votes. Mr Gore immediately contested this result in a state circuit court, in a legal suit which could go on for weeks.
Yesterday he and his legal team proposed that recounts of disputed ballots in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties should begin today and be concluded in seven days so that the court could give its decision several days later.
"Unfortunately, Mr Bush's lawyers rejected this proposal," Mr Gore told reporters at his mansion yesterday.
Instead the Bush lawyers opted for additional hearings which would continue until the December 12th deadline for appointing Florida's electors, Mr Gore said.
The judge hearing the Gore objections to the Florida result was to rule later on the accelerated counts proposal.
According to a CNN/USA Today poll published yesterday, 56 per cent want Mr Gore to concede the election now. A week ago opinion on this question was evenly divided at 46 per cent each.
Some 62 per cent say the counting and recounting has gone on too long.
A Washington Post/ABC News poll has 60 per cent agreeing that Mr Gore should concede and allow Mr Bush to become President, and 35 per cent saying that the courts should decide whether the Florida count was fair.
Perhaps the most worrying result for Mr Gore is the CNN/ABC poll showing that 36 per cent of Gore supporters now say he should concede, up by eight per cent from a week earlier.
This is a dismaying trend for the Vice-President, who strongly defended his contesting of the election - the first time this has happened in US history - when he addressed the nation on television on Monday night.
Against a backdrop of US flags, Mr Gore insisted that all he is asking for is "a complete count of all the votes cast in Florida."
Emphasising the sacredness of every American's vote, he said: "If the people in the end do not choose me, so be it. The outcome will have been fair and the people will have spoken."
But he went on to list his complaints about the Florida counts and the Bush campaign's efforts to "delay and stop" recounts.
In his court action in Florida, Mr Gore is challenging the counts in three counties: MiamiDade, Palm Beach and Nassau. If there had been proper counts there, he would have been declared the winner in Florida, Mr Gore's lawyers claim.
While the court in Tallahassee will eventually hand down a decision, the Gore and Bush campaigns are battling daily on TV and the airwaves to win public opinion.
Senator Joe Lieberman, Mr Gore's running mate, has been hammering away at the situation in Miami-Dade county. Yesterday on CBS television he claimed that 10,000 votes have never been counted.
He is referring to the fact that two machine counts in the heavily Democratic county registered no vote for President on about 10,500 ballots, although votes for other elections were recorded by those voters.
But the former Secretary of State, Mr James Baker, speaking for Mr Bush, rejected this claim at a news conference in Florida.
"It is wrong, simply wrong and, I would submit, not fair to say, as our opponents do over and over, that these votes have never been counted." He said that there are similar non-votes for President all over the US.