ASHINGTON - A deeply divided US Supreme Court dealt Al Gore's presidential hopes an apparently fatal blow last night by overturning last week's Florida Supreme Court ruling and declaring the state's methods of recounting votes unfair, unconstitutional, and apparently impossible to fix in time.
''Because it is evident that any recount seeking to meet the Dec. 12 date will be unconstitutional ... we reverse the judgment of the Supreme Court of Florida ordering the recount to proceed,'' the majority opinion declared, in remanding the case back to the Florida court.
Former secretary of state James A. Baker III said that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were ''very pleased and gratified'' by the decision.
Last night's ruling, coming 35 days after the election, appeared to clear the way for Bush to win Florida's 25 electoral votes and thus gain a narrow victory in the Electoral College on Dec. 18 as well. Gore is expected to indicate his response to the decision today.
The court's order, which was unsigned, said seven justices agreed that the recount was unfair because it lacked a uniform standard for deciding legal votes. But at least two of those seven, Justices Stephen Breyer and David Souter, said the Florida judiciary should still be given a chance to fix it.
''The court was wrong to take this case. It was wrong to grant a stay. It should now vacate that stay and permit the Florida Supreme Court to decide whether the recount should resume,'' Breyer wrote, in a dissent joined by Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Thus, on the root question of whether a recount might still fairly resume, the high court split 5-4, strictly along its conservative-liberal fault line. It was the same margin, with the same justices on either side, as in the court's decision last weekend to halt the recount.
The high court's ruling, 65 pages with multiple dissents and concurrences, left Gore with few, if any, legal options, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe told NBC News.
''I am afraid that is right,'' Tribe said, when asked if the 2000 election had been ended by by the Supreme Court. ''The gracious thing is to accept, even if one disagrees with the US Supreme Court.''
Tribe said Gore might be able to appeal the case, which the high court sent back to the Florida Supreme Court. But Breyer's dissent said that the court's ruling on setting standards for recounts was so tightly drawn as to end Gore's quest for the White House.
The ruling was released at 10 p.m., and the nation was treated to the scene of television reporters, standing on a winter night on the steps of the Supreme Court building, trying to interpret the complex ruling. The high court generally follows a precise and prescribed schedule, and for a decision to be handed down after dark was very unusual, if not unprecedented.
The case, of course, was also unprecedented and marked the first time that the Supreme Court had been asked to decide a presidential election contest. In this landmark ruling, the court majority found that because Florida lacked a uniform, county-to-county standard for counting disputed votes, it violated the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.
''It is obvious that the recount cannot be conducted in compliance with the requirements of equal protection and due process without substantial additional work,'' the court majority said.
Because Florida law assumes that any recounts would be completed by Dec. 12, the court said, it would be impossible to do that work by midnight last night.
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas went further in a separate opinion, saying the Florida Supreme Court also violated the Constitution and federal law in ordering the recount in the first place.
''In most cases, comity and respect for federalism compel us to defer to the decisions of state courts on issues of law,'' Rehnquist wrote. ''But there are a few exceptional cases in which the Constitution imposes a duty or confers a power on a particular branch of a state's government. This is one of them.''
In a searing dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens called the decision a ''federal assault'' on the laws of the state of Florida.
''Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today's decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law,'' Stevens wrote.
Justices Ginsburg and Breyer joined in that dissent. Justice David Souter wrote a separate dissent.
Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy, whom Gore and his allies had hoped to draw to their side, did not sign any separate opinion, but their votes were counted in the main unsigned opinion.
Theodore Olson, Bush's lawyer, had argued in the Supreme Court Monday that the high court should permanently stop the vote counting in Florida. Not only was time running out for the state to certify its electors, but the Florida Supreme Court had authorized ''extensive and unequal manual recounts'' that were prohibited by the US Constitution and federal law.
David Boies, Gore's lawyer, disputed that the Florida court had done more than interpret state law. But he acknowledged that under the Florida standard of voter intent, what constituted a legal vote might vary from county to county and ''individual to individual'' judge.
The justices were cognizant that the court's reputation could be damaged by a ruling the public perceived as partisan. According to a Wall Street Journal poll published yesterday, 53 percent of those surveyed said they approved of the court's decision Saturday to stop the Florida recount, and 53 percent also said they thought the ruling was based mostly on politics.
Justice Breyer seemed to take note of that in his dissent. ''The appearance of a split decision runs the risk of undermining public confidence in the Supreme Court itself,'' he wrote.
Throughout the day, the US Supreme Court kept the nation waiting for its decision.
On Nov. 24, the justices agreed to hear Bush's appeal on the legality of the Florida Supreme Court's Nov. 21 ruling that allowed for manual recounts in selected counties and extended the vote-certification deadline by 12 days. In oral arguments on Dec. 1, Bush lawyers argued the Tallahassee court had violated a federal statute by making new election law, while Gore's attorneys said the Florida court was interpreting state law in the usual exercise of judicial review.
Three days later, in an unsigned opinion, the high court set aside the Florida court ruling and put the certification on hold, pending an explanation from the Tallahassee court of how it had reached its original decision.
The Supreme Court's ruling was widely viewed as a cautious and prudent way for the justices to get out of the election cross-hairs. But on Saturday, Bush's lawyers were back at the Supreme Court, appealing the Florida Supreme Court's decision the day before to restart the count of disputed ballots.
In a stunning announcement, the Supreme Court not only agreed to revisit the Bush-Gore case, but by a 5-4 vote, halted the counting that had begun in Florida only hours before. Stevens issued a stinging rebuke to the majority; Scalia wrote that the ''issuance of a stay suggests the majority of the court'' believed Bush ''has a substantial probability of success.''
On Monday, the nine justices heard oral arguments over whether to resume the manual count of presidential votes in Florida.
A number of the justices said during Monday's arguments that they were troubled that the interpretation of Florida's ''intent of the voter'' standard varied from county to county. Souter said one remedy would be to send the case back to the state circuit court in Florida with instructions to write a more specific standard.
Peter Irons, author of several histories of the Supreme Court, said if the court had been looking for a compromise, Souter's idea could have been the core for a negotiation. He said it could attract the court's liberal justices - Stevens, Ginsburg, and Breyer, an perhaps intrigue swing Justices Kennedy and O'Connor, and win over Rehnquist, who is has the court's legacy in mind.
''If they are trying to work out that kind of compromise, that is good news for Gore,'' Irons said.
But the outside observers did not know what was going on in the court's chambers. Typically, in cases that stretch over months, the justices are well on their way to deciding on the basis of briefs and research by their law clerks long before they hear oral arguments.
This case's accelerated schedule changed those rules. Most likely, court scholars say, the justices met after Monday's arguments and voted on how to rule. The chief justice, if he was in the majority, would assign a justice to write the opinion, which would then circulate among all the other justices, with the intent of persuading them to stay in the majority, or join it.
When the court is divided - and this one was and often is - it is not uncommon for there to be a majority opinion, a concurring opinion, and one or more dissenting opinions.
''Ideally, one would like to see the Supreme Court speaking 9-0, because that carries a very high warranty that the decision was the result of reasoning from a spectrum of perspectives,'' said Daniel Polsby, professor of law at George Mason University in Virginia. ''So 5-4 is not as good, but in this unusual case, the principle is less important than the outcome.''
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
