Lawyers begin White House battle

The battle for the White House took a bitter turn today as lawyers started feuding over alleged voter fraud.

There were fears the election result would be delayed beyond next week by protracted disputes.

Analysts were even taking seriously the possibility of Tuesday's vote resulting in a tie in the electoral college, an outcome that would leave the eventual winner struggling to gain authority.

All major polls showed the tiny gap between George Bush and John Kerry narrowing even further. A poll of polls showed President Bush clinging to a two-point lead with 48.4 per cent against Mr Kerry's 46.4 per cent. One tracking survey, the ABC/Washington Post poll, put Mr Kerry ahead by a single point.

A blizzard of legal action was launched by the Democrats in Florida, with writs alleging attempts to gerrymander the key state's result by disenfranchising students and voters in black areas.

Nine court actions are under way. They include an attempt to overturn Republican officials for disqualifying voters who failed to tick a box declaring they were US citizens, which the Democrats claim was designed to hit ethnic minorities.

Another action was looming after 60,000 postal votes went missing in the mail in southern Florida. In Ohio, another key state, lawyers were challenging a ruling that voters who went to the wrong polling stations should have their votes torn up.

In the same state a man was charged with filling in 100 fake voter registration forms in names including Mary Poppins and Michael Jackson.

Bush officials accused the Kerry camp of creating bogus legal rows to discredit a Bush victory. The president's campaign manager Ken Mehlman claimed the aim was "to try to shoehorn a victory" with selective legal challenges. The Democrats have 10,000 attorneys trained to contest ballot rulings and six "Swat" teams on standby to fly to key states at a moment's notice. The Republicans refuse to say how many lawyers they have on call.

Disputes over the Florida result in the last elections delayed the final result for weeks. "After learning the lesson of 2000, both sides have geared up early," said Barry Richard, who argued Mr Bush's case at the Florida Supreme Court four years ago.More than half of Americans - and seven in 10 Democrats - told an AP poll they expected the election to turn into a legal quagmire.

Academics have calculated that on the current too-close-to-call surveys there is a strong chance that both candidates will tie at 269 electoral college votes each when the states declare - one short of the "magic 270" figure needed for victory.

"Let us hope for a wide victory by one of the two - the alternative is too awful to contemplate," said Walter Berns, an electoral college expert at the American Enterprise Institute.