To date there are no bombs, but make no mistake: Florida is at this moment in a state of war.
Both the Republican and Democratic parties have sent in their toughest combat troops, from one end of the Sunshine State to the other.
There are between 80 and 100 political operatives for each side, overseeing war rooms in almost every county. The troops are being led by senior lawyers with laptop computers, mobile phones and handheld wireless text pagers called Blackberries.
Seats are at a premium on the local airline's 19-seater plane between the capital of Tallahasse, in the northern part of the state, and the southern cities of Palm Beach and Miami as lawyers and aides and journalists shuttle between hot spots and courthouses.
Mr Gore's team is being led by Mr Ron Klain, a former White House chief of staff. A Harvard University constitutional lawyer, Mr Lawrence Tribe, is heading the legal effort.
Mr Joe Allbaugh, a member of Mr Bush's inner circle, and Mr Ben Ginsberg, a veteran election lawyer, are directing the Republicans effort.
The contested US presidential election is now a morass of state and federal lawsuits whose initial results are leading to a legal collision. In Miami, a federal court judge ruled yesterday afternoon against the Bush team's attempt to stop the manual recounting of ballots in four disputed counties. Judge Donald Middlebrooks said that Mr Bush's team had failed to prove it would suffer "irreparable harm" if the recounting continued.
But meanwhile, the state's most senior election official vowed to wrap up the vote recount by late Tuesday afternoon.
"The law unambiguously states when the process of counting and recounting the votes cast on Election Day must end," Ms Katherine Harris, Florida's secretary of state, said in a written statement distributed in Tallahassee. "For this election, that time is 5 p.m. November 14th, which is tomorrow." Ms Harris is demanding that all counties submit their final results today. The state will then wait for absentee results to arrive on Friday, and will then certify the election.
Ms Harris's decision to require counties to certify results today prompted a sharp retort from Mr Warren Christopher, representing the Gore campaign. He suggested that she was biased because of her Republican political affiliation. "We regard the action of the secretary to be arbitrary and unreasonable," he said. He said the county election boards and the Gore campaign would appeal promptly, and officials in Volusia County filed papers in state court seeking to extend the 5 p.m. deadline.
Officials in some counties said they could not physically complete the hand recounts by the deadline.
The Bush camp argues that hand recounts are a sort of third election - after the regular November 7th voting and an automated recount that took place last week.
Aside from the legal wrangling, both the Bush and Gore camps are carefully monitoring American public opinion.
Thus far, most people in the polls are saying a careful recount, rather than a speedy resolution, is necessary. But as the stock market suffers from uncertainty and tensions fray, public patience with the bickering may grow thin.
AFP adds: In a survey published yesterday by CNN/Time, 49 per cent of the respondents said they considered the Florida recount a serious problem compared to 15 per cent who viewed it as a constitutional crisis. Most of the respondents say they could live with either a President Al Gore (82 per cent) or a President George W. Bush (79 per cent).