Mexico City ? Leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was sending hundreds of pages of purported evidence of fraud Sunday to a court he hoped would overturn his conservative rival’s razor-thin preliminary victory.

Lopez Obrador said his lawyers would give the Federal Electoral Court evidence of fraud, including computerized manipulation of the results, a day after he called for continued hope from supporters at a mammoth rally in Mexico City’s historic center.

The legal appeal would seek not to annul the July 2 election, but to force authorities to conduct a manual recount of all 41 million ballots.

“This was a very irregular election and we are asking that they count vote by vote to legitimize the president elect,” Gerardo Fernandez, a spokesman for Lopez Obrador’s Democratic Revolution Party, said outside the tribunal Sunday night as he waited for lawyers to arrive.

“We won’t recognize Calderon’s triumph unless they legitimize the election,” he said.

Dozens of reporters waited outside the nation’s top electoral court as the lawyers’ expected arrival was repeatedly delayed. Three soldiers kept watch over a scene that was calm in contrast to Saturday’s massive gathering.

Fernandez said the lawyers were held up by making copies of the 800 pages of allegations.

Election officials said Thursday that Felipe Calderon beat Lopez Obrador by less than 244,000 votes in the July 2 election – or a margin of just 0.6 percent.

But Lopez Obrador contends some of his votes weren’t counted or were voided without reason. He has millions of devoted followers who believe only he can help Mexico’s poor and downtrodden, and he has long used street protests to pressure the government and courts.

Lopez Obrador’s claims also include allegations that President Vicente Fox used government funds to support Calderon, the candidate of Fox’s conservative National Action Party.

Fox has denied interfering in the elections, and election monitors from the European Union said they found no irregularities in the vote count.

But fraud allegations strike a sensitive nerve with many Mexicans. They question whether Mexico has overcome decades of institutional corruption and fraud that long favored the ruling party – the Institutional Revolutionary Party for 71 years until it lost the presidency to Fox in 2000.

Lopez Obrador has sought to stoke those fears. On Saturday, he accused the respected Federal Electoral Institute, held up as an example to emerging democracies around the world, of being a “pawn of the party of the right.”

Representatives for Fox and Calderon were not immediately available to comment.