ROM THE START, the Florida presidential vote should have been determined by counting as many votes as possible.
Yesterday, courts high and low joined the campaign of Texas Governor George W. Bush in moving to decide the result - and with it the presidency - based on too few votes, as determined by a narrow reading of the law.
Vice President Al Gore is right to make one last appeal to the state Supreme Court, but it will take a collective profile in courage for the justices there to swim against the tide now gathering against Gore.
Circuit Court Judge N. Sanders Sauls rejected all of Gore's bids for complete hand counts in two counties yesterday based on the finding that Gore had not established a ''reasonable probability'' that a recount would overturn the statewide results - a threshold set out in state law for contesting certified election results. Probably, Sauls was technically right. Gore himself said on Nov. 15, when asking for a recount, ''I don't know what the final results will show.''
Still, the discouraging end product is that many thousands of legitimate votes - including several hundred already tabulated - will not be counted. Sauls had the ballots in his court, but he never looked at one.
There is one other possibility here: that the absentee ballots in either of two counties where Republican Party workers improperly helped thousands of voters may be ruled invalid. This would throw the state to Gore on the same sort of technical grounds that Bush's camp has been using. This result is unlikely, and it would be unfortunate, since the goal should be to add real votes, not subtract them.
The United States Supreme Court, meanwhile, shrank from the role of national arbiter and healer by taking a temporizing action - asking the Florida high court to explain itself. The Florida court's Nov. 21 opinion, extending the deadline for certification, did embrace the state constitution's eloquent assertion of the principle that ''all political power is inherent in the people.'' But the opinion rested properly on interpretation of Florida statutes.
The US Supreme Court seems to be as deeply divided as the country. Its weak-kneed opinion yesterday was a major disappointment.
The path toward legitimacy for either Bush or Gore has always been for the votes to be counted as completely and fairly as possible. Surrounded above and below by courts relying on narrow technical arguments, the Florida Supreme Court will need courage to further that goal.
