WASHINGTON – As President Bush and Senator Kerry entered the final eight days of the deadlocked presidential race, what Republican voters called intimidation by Democrats threatened to close several early polling stations in the tensely divided state of Florida.

Mr. Kerry, in a statistical tie with the president in Florida polls, attended church services in the key swing state yesterday and spoke of being guided by his Roman Catholic faith despite disagreeing with some of its tenets.

Vice President Gore asked Democrats in the state to channel their anger over the results of the 2000 election recount into “action” on Election Day, but Republicans said the anger was being aimed at them.

Democratic poll-watchers and labor union members rallied in front of polling stations, shouted, chanted, and in some cases physically grabbed Republican voters, according to Republican voters who documented their complaints in affidavits.

Governor Bush yesterday called continuing reports of intimidation “disturbing.” He instructed county election supervisors to remove from voting sites people who intimidate voters through “rough language, screaming, or menacing actions.”

“The right to vote is our most fundamental right. We cannot tolerate any behavior that seeks to abridge that right,” the governor, who is a brother of the president’s, wrote to the supervisor of elections for Orange County, Bill Cowles.

Mr. Cowles had warned the governor Friday that the county could be forced to close eight polling stations “because there is so much havoc being caused by these people.” If that happened, thousands of Floridians might be unable to cast their votes early.

Early-voting laws in Florida do not include all the restrictions that apply on Election Day, most notably a prohibition on soliciting voters near a polling place.

“They are chanting and very aggressive. If we were doing that, we would be plastered all over the papers,” said a spokesman for the Florida Republican Party, Joe Agostini, who observed polling stations in Broward County.

Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, Orange, and Duvall counties were also sites of Republican complaints documented in affidavits made available to reporters.

The intimidation complaints come on the heels of reports of irregularities in voter registrations in closely divided states such as Ohio and of break-ins to Republican headquarters in several states. Democrats have accused Republicans of paying to have Democratic voter forms ripped up in Oregon and Nevada, an accusation Republicans have denied.

“We’ve got to make sure this is an honest election, and I’m concerned by the widespread fraud that’s going on in terms of registrations around the country,” the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ed Gillespie, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The chairman for the Democratic National Committee, Terry McAuliffe, responded, “The goal of the Democratic Party is to make sure that everybody who has a right to vote in this country can go into those polls and can vote.”

Mr. McAuliffe said Republicans have a history of keeping African-American and Latino voters from the polls. “They’re going to try and disenfranchise voters. We want everybody to vote,” he said.

Democrats are dispatching 10,000 lawyers across the country to oversee voting, including 2,500 in Florida alone, he said.

“We want them to go in, we want them to vote, and if there are issues as relates to Florida that we had in 2000, we will quickly have people on the ground,” Mr. McAuliffe said.

Mr. Gillespie said the presence of the lawyers is “disconcerting,” and he predicted that if Mr. Bush wins the election, “They’re going to sue and they’re going to try and haul the electoral process into courtrooms across the country in hopes of finding activist, liberal judges who will subvert the will of the voters and impose their decision on the electorate.”

With polls showing both candidates in a statistical tie, each side brought out heavy star power.

Governor Schwarzenegger of California was expected to stump in Ohio for Mr. Bush this week, focusing on the need for presidential “resolve” in the war on terrorism. Mr. Bush picked up three major newspaper endorsements yesterday in Ohio.

Meanwhile, President Clinton, who recently underwent quadruple-bypass surgery, kicks off a week of campaigning in an appearance today with Mr. Kerry in Philadelphia. Mr. Clinton was expected to campaign at rallies and church services and to help mobilize voters by taping phone messages, the Kerry campaign said. His role is to “remind” voters of the flush state of the economy and federal finances four years ago, Kerry campaign aides said.

Mr. Clinton is also expected to campaign today in Florida, where Mr. Kerry’s fortunes were boosted yesterday when he was endorsed by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. It was the first time in 40 years that the newspaper, based in Fort Lauderdale, had endorsed a Democrat.

Mr. Kerry spoke in Fort Lauderdale yesterday of being influenced by his Roman Catholic faith, which he has said he does not “wear on my sleeve.”

“I know there are some bishops who have suggested that as a public official I must cast votes or take public positions, on issues like a woman’s right to choose and stem-cell research, that carry out the tenets of the Catholic Church. I love my church; I respect the bishops; but I respectfully disagree,” Mr. Kerry said.

“My task, as I see it, is not to write every doctrine into law. That is not possible or right in a pluralistic society. But my faith does give me values to live by and apply to the decisions I make,” he said.

The senator also questioned whether Mr. Bush, who speaks frequently and passionately of his religious faith, has governed in accordance with those values.

“Are we living up to our values when we pass on the costs of a war to future generations instead of asking the wealthiest among us to bear a measure of the wartime sacrifice?” he asked.

The Kerry campaign began to take the president to task yesterday for a comment he made on a TV program, “Hannity and Colmes,” shown on the Fox News Channel’s. “Whether or not we can be ever fully safe is up – you know, is up in the air,” the president said.

“You make me president of the United States, we’re going to win the war on terror,” Mr. Kerry said at an evening rally in Boca Raton. “It’s not going to be up in the air whether or not we make America safe,” he said, according to the Associated Press.

The president quickly backed away from the earlier remark, asserting that the war on terror could be won, even if not in a conventional sense, and that he “probably needed to be more articulate.”

Speaking at a high-school stadium in Alamogordo, Mr. Bush cited his differences with Kerry over Iraq.

On a day when Jordan-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s group claimed responsibility for ambushing and killing 50 U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers, Mr. Bush, according to AP, said: “Our troops will defeat Zarqawi and his likes overseas in Iraq so we do not have to face them here at home.”

Mr. Kerry planned campaign stops today in New Hampshire, Philadelphia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Mr. Bush planned appearances in Colorado, Wisconsin, and Iowa.