ALLAHASSEE - A divided US Supreme Court stood poised today to potentially render the final word in this year's presidential election, and Al Gore hoped once again to fend off a loss to George W. Bush by persuading the justices to permit the recount of 45,000 undervoted Florida ballots.
Attorneys for Gore and Bush met yesterday's 4 p.m. deadline to file 50-page briefs outlining their positions, with the vice president's lawyers arguing the nation should not choose its president ''without counting all the ballots legally cast in that state.''
Their brief added: ''Voters have important rights to have their ballots counted, and the magnitude of those rights dwarfs'' any legal arguments raised by the Bush team.
The importance of the filing was telegraphed by David Boies, the attorney arguing the case on Gore's behalf. ''If no votes are counted, then I think that's the end of the road,'' Boies told ''Fox News Sunday.''
Lawyers for the Texas governor argued that the counts, ordered Friday by the Florida Supreme Court, would violate the 14th Amendment's equal protection guarantee. They said the Florida Supreme Court provided no clear standard for evaluating the ballots, so they could receive more weight than votes counted by machines on Election Day.
''The court's newly devised scheme for retabulating votes is plainly arbitrary, capricious, unequal, and standardless,'' the Republican brief said.
They also argued that counting the undervotes would ''incite controversy, suspicion, and lack of confidence'' in the election of the nation's 43d president.
The disputed ballots are deemed ''undervotes'' because they contained clear votes in a variety of races held Nov. 7, but not the ticket-topping presidential race. In Florida, 6.1 million of the state's 8.8 million registered voters cast ballots, or a turnout of 70 percent.
On Saturday, Florida election officials had started examining the 45,000 undervotes in search of marks that could indicate whether voters tried to pick either the Democratic or Republican candidate.
The counting stopped at midafternoon, when the US Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, ordered a halt until it could hold a hearing at 11 a.m. today.
In today's 90-minute session, each side was alloted 45 minutes for oral arguments. Bush is being represented by Theodore Olson, as he was on Dec. 1 when the court held its first hearing in the election dispute. Boies replaced Harvard Law School constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, a change the Gore campaign said was driven by an expected focus on state issues that Boies argued last week before the Florida Supreme Court.
Away from the hushed halls of the nation's highest court, both sides waged a vociferous battle in the court of public opinion. Bush representative James A. Baker III stopped by all five major-network Sunday talk shows. The Gore team countered with appearances by Boies and Warren M. Christopher, the former secretary of state who has been overseeing Gore's recount effort.
The candidates themselves largely remained out of public view, but their lone sightings served as mirror images of their appearances after the Florida Supreme Court ruling on Friday.
Bush, who was deflated as he left Austin, Texas, for his ranch on Saturday, returned yesterday afternoon for a Christmas party and reveled in the cheers of supporters gathered outside the governor's mansion. Gore, who popped champagne Friday night only to have the Florida ruling upstaged 23 hours later by the US Supreme Court, quietly made his way to church in suburban Washington.
Christopher said the Gore team hopes its argument today will appeal to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. In the Dec. 1 hearing, she expressed reservations about whether a federal court could settle a dispute stemming from state election laws.
O'Connor sided with the court's conservatives on Saturday. In a statement that accompanied the ruling, Justice Antonin Scalia sounded a note that boosted Bush and cast doubt on Gore's prospects.
''It suffices to say that the issuance of the stay suggests that a majority of the court, while not deciding the issues presented, believe that the petitioner has a substantial probability of success,'' Scalia wrote, referring to Bush.
Lanny Davis, a former Clinton White House counsel, suggested yesterday that Scalia may want to recuse himself from the Florida recount case because his son works for a firm that represents Bush.
Eugene Scalia is a partner in the Washington office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Olson, also a partner there, will represent Bush for a second time in oral arguments tomorrow. Eugene Scalia yesterday told the Associated Press that he is not working on the Bush case.
Speaking on CNN's ''Late Edition,'' Christopher warned that the split between the court's conservative and liberal wings threatened its standing with the public and in history. ''The court enters this thicket, I think, with a good deal of danger,'' said Christopher, once a Supreme Court clerk.
Despite Scalia's statement, Baker said he was not assured that Scalia, O'Connor and the rest of Saturday's majority, Justices Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice William Rehnquist, would rule in favor of Bush. Court observers expected a quick decision, given that each state must certify its slate of presidential electors by tomorrow if it hopes to avoid congressional review.
''It absolutely is not a foregone conclusion,'' Baker said on NBC's ''Meet the Press,'' ''and we do not interpret it that way. We're quite aware of the ups and downs that this odyssey has taken over the course of the past 33 days.''
Christopher argued that tomorrow is a fictitious deadline, since members of the Electoral College do not cast their ballots for president until Dec. 18. Also, constitutional scholars have noted that the vote does not become official until Jan. 6, when Congress meets to accept or reject each state's electoral vote.
Tomorrow is merely the deadline for a so-called ''safe harbor'' provision in federal election law. Until that time, Congress has no jurisdiction to intervene in electoral disputes. After that date, it can vote to accept or reject electoral slates submitted by a state.
If there is a dispute during the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress, the House and Senate would hold separate votes about accepting or rejecting an electoral slate.
Congressional observers envision a deadlock over Florida's slate. The House, which will have a nine-member Republican majority when the new Congress is sworn in Jan. 3, would surely back a pro-Bush slate. The new US Senate will have a 50-50 party split and would surely deadlock in supporting the slate. In that case, Gore, serving as president of the chamber, would cast the tie-breaking vote. If he rejected the slate, it would be up to Florida's governor, Jeb Bush, the brother of the Republican candidate, to pick a slate.
The Gore campaign says there is reason to believe that the vice president would win the Florida popular vote if the undervotes were counted. It points to the results of the counts that occurred before Saturday's injunction from the US Supreme Court.
Gore adviser Ron Klain told reporters that Gore had narrowed Bush's 154-vote lead by picking up 58 votes from 13 counties. The Associated Press said Bush's margin had risen to 177 votes. Facing a court gag order, county officials did not disclose their results, but some tallies leaked out.
Less than a dozen counties had completed their counts when the Supreme Court issued its order, but Gore had picked up three votes in Escambia County and 18 in Orange County. Bush had picked up one vote in Collier County. In Pinellas County, like many others, the count was underway, and Bush had picked up two votes and Gore one vote among the 227 ballots that had been counted.
Some 9,000 ballots from heavily Democratic Miami-Dade County, which were being examined in Tallahassee, were about halfway counted when election officials stopped. The ballots were returned to the county courthouse, where they had been placed amid the legal action in the Florida Supreme Court.
The uncertainty about continuing the counts led to a lazy Sunday in the capital city. The only activity came when a court spokesman dispelled rumors that the Miami-Dade ballots had been sent to Washington. Spokesman Craig Waters said only court papers were transferred.
The pace was expected to quicken today, when the Legislature resumes a special session to consider nominating an alternate slate of electors. Legislative committees were set to consider a resolution introduced on Friday. If they pass it, the Florida House was set to vote tomorrow and the Senate will follow Wednesday. It could be forwarded to Governor Jeb Bush for his signature that same day.
There was also the potential for activity today by the Florida Supreme Court. It has yet to decide whether it will hear appeals on cases from Martin and Seminole counties.
Last week, a pair of circuit court judges ruled against a request to throw out 25,000 absentee ballots.
Some voters complained because local Republican officials had helped fill out applications for 2,500 absentee voters.
The lower-court rulings preserved Bush's margin in the state, but a reversal by the state Supreme Court could throw the election to Gore, and certainly another appeal by Bush to the US Supreme Court.
