With the city budget signed, sealed, and delivered, the speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller, has moved into full campaign mode. One of four Democrats running for mayor, Mr. Miller launched a “100 neighborhoods” tour yesterday that will have him barnstorming through the city for the next two months, shaking hands at subway stations and visiting senior centers.

Mr. Miller, who was in khaki pants and a button-down shirt instead of the pin-striped suit he usually sports, walked over the Brooklyn Bridge with a group of about 30 supporters, many of them waving blue “Gifford Miller for Mayor” signs.

For the next two months, he will spend most of his days hopping between campaign events. In the evenings his wife, Pamela, and their two sons, Marshall and Addison, will join him at parks, pools, and other locales.

At a small rally at Cadman Plaza, the candidate, as he has in the past, called Mayor Bloomberg a “caretaker” mayor who has “no vision” for the city’s future.

The borough president of Brooklyn, Martin Markowitz, who was at the rally, said Mr. Miller, 35, is the only Democrat with four years of “on-hands experience” in running city government.

One supporter at the event, Ronniella Boles, a traffic agent who writes parking tickets, said Mr. Bloomberg is not bad but there is “room for improvement.”

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The Democratic mayoral front-runner, Fernando Ferrer, joined the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Alford Sharpton and other political leaders yesterday to encourage the support of the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is set to expire in August 2007.

“We may no longer see literacy tests required, but make no mistake, African-Americans and other minorities, including non-English speakers, are still facing obstacles at the polls,” Mr. Ferrer said.

Among its provisions, the Voting Rights Act bans literacy tests at the polls and stipulates that specified counties cannot change their voting practices without the approval of the attorney general or the U.S. District Court. In New York, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan are singled out under the act, and Mr. Ferrer said he probably would not have been elected without it. He also emphasized the need for fair voting practices in the upcoming mayoral election.

The Rainbow/PUSH Coalition is sponsoring a march and rally August 6 in Atlanta to support reauthorizing the act, fighting for the workers’ right to organize, and protesting the war in Iraq.

Noticeably absent from the gathering was the sole black candidate for mayor, C. Virginia Fields. A spokeswoman for the Fields campaign, Kirsten Powers, said the candidate had a scheduling conflict.

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Mayor Bloomberg launched his television advertising campaign with a message in Spanish, and he has spoken at least a few sentences in Spanish on the campaign trail – most featuring the word for mayor, “alcalde.” The novelty of the first “trilingual press conference” of his re-election campaign drew a large crowd of reporters and cameras to Harlem Hospital yesterday.

Between 135th and 136th streets on Malcolm X Boulevard, Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign spokesman, Stuart Loeser, handed out press releases in English, Spanish, and Mandarin, saying the Doctor’s Council-SEIU was endorsing the mayor for re-election. The group, founded in 1973, made its first political endorsements this year.

Outside Harlem Hospital, which has undergone a $225 million renovation under the Bloomberg administration, doctors wearing white coats and hospital name tags spoke in their native languages of Mr. Bloomberg’s commitment to public health. At the last minute, Punjabi was added to the roster of languages, making the event the first quadrilingual one of this campaign season.

“This mayor thinks like a doctor,” one physician, Fanyi Kong, said in Mandarin, according to a translation provided to the press. “He understands the critical value of preventative care and the need to keep our public health-care system healthy.”

The mayor, speaking only English, discussed some of his public health victories, including the smoking ban, which he said led to a 17.7% decrease in smoking in New York City in its first year.

Before he was escorted away by his staff, back to City Hall for a bill signing, he advised New Yorkers to follow the advice of their doctors and vote for Bloomberg.