TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — The Florida Supreme Court ordered manual recounts across Florida on Friday night in a victory for Al Gore, and George W. Bush's campaign swiftly vowed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"We think this ruling is inconsistent with Florida law, with federal law and with the U.S. Constitution," former Secretary of State James A. Baker III said on behalf of the Bush campaign. He read at length from a stinging dissent authorized by the chief justice of the state Supreme Court to the ruling issued by four other justices.

Baker spoke as Bush campaign attorneys were filing an emergency petition with the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta asking that the recounts be stopped — before they could begin — until the nation's highest court can settle the issue.

Bush's campaign swung into action within hours of a state Supreme Court ruling that held out the threat that the Texas governor's 537-victory margin could be overturned in the state that stands to pick the next president.

Saying it was dealing with the "essence of the structure of our democratic society," the Florida Supreme Court ordered recounts to begin immediately in an unknown number of counties where no earlier manual recounts have been undertaken. The 4-3 ruling ordered the count of the so-called undercount ballots — or those where counting machines registered no vote for president.

"Although in all elections the Legislature and the courts have recognized that the voter's intent is paramount, in close elections the necessity for counting all legal votes becomes critical," the divided court said.

In a dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Charles T. Wells said he was concerned that the decision "propels this country and this state into an unprecedented and unnecessary constitutional crisis."

Wells said he saw a "real and present likelihood" that the result would be "substantial damage" to the nation, the state and the high court itself. He said the majority ruling had "no foundation in the law of Florida" and that a lower court decision rejecting the recounts was correct.

Justices Major B. Harding and Leander J. Shaw joined in a separate dissent.

The ruling heartened the Gore campaign, which has been struggling in the courts for weeks to gain a count of thousands of ballots in a few counties. The state's high court ruling extended far more broadly, however, saying ballots should be counted in all counties where there were undervotes.

The mechanics of the recount were unclear, but one immediate result was that Circuit Judge N. Sanders Sauls, who had earlier refused to order a recount, recused himself from further proceedings in the case. Officials said they would name a replacement for Sauls later in the evening.

Baker denounced the court's ruling lavishly.

Reading from Wells' dissent, he read, "the majority's decision ... has no foundation in the law of Florida as it existed on Nov. 7, 2000 or at any time until the issuance of this opinion."

The decision followed a twin legal defeat earlier Friday for Gore in the lower courts.

But in its opinion, the state Supreme Court handed the vice president a sweeping victory, finding that Circuit Court Judge N. Sanders Sauls had erred in rejecting further recounts.

Sauls' decision left George W. Bush with a certified 537-vote lead in the state, giving him enough of an edge to capture the state's 25 electoral votes.

"We are dealing with the essence of the structure of our democratic society," the court said, noting the fragility of the subject.

It noted that the Legislature has put the presidential election in Florida "squarely in the hands of Florida's voters" and has granted trial courts broad authority to resolve election disputes and fashion appropriate relief.

"This election should be determined by a careful examination of the votes of Florida's citizens and not by strategies extraneous to the voting process," the opinion said. "This essential principle, that the outcome of the elections be determined by the will of the voters, forms the foundation of the election code enacted by the Florida Legislature and has been consistently applied by the court in resolving elections disputes."

The court said there had been an "undisputed showing" that 9,000 disputed ballots in Miami-Dade County could produce further votes in an election decided by a margin of mere hundreds.

The court said a legal vote is one in which there is a clear indication of the intent of the voter. It established that a vote rejected by computers includes "votes that may exist but have not been counted."

The ruling means that the 9,000 disputed ballots from Miami-Dade County that Sauls ordered brought up to the Leon County Circuit Court but never counted will finally be studied.

The court said Sauls had presented Gore with "the ultimate Catch-22, acceptance of the only evidence that will resolve the issue but a refusal to examine such evidence."

It also said the Florida vote should include 215 additional votes for Gore resulting from a full manual recount in Palm Beach County, along with an additional 168 votes for Gore that were produced by a partial manual recount in Miami-Dade before its canvassing board halted the count.

That decision trimmed Bush's 537-vote lead in the state to 154 votes.

"We're very pleased that the votes will be counted. Although it's a very difficult task, we think it can be done," said Gore lawyer Dexter Douglass.

The high court's ruling came almost two hours after Gore had been pushed to the edge of his legal options when two Leon County Circuit Court judges refused to throw out any of 25,000 absentee ballots that had been challenged in Martin and Seminole counties.

In those cases, judges Nikki Clark and Terry Lewis ruled that "despite irregularities in the requests for absentee ballots, neither the sanctity of the ballots nor the integrity of the elections has been compromised," a court clerk read from a prepared statement.

The elections "reflect a full and fair expression of the will of the voters," in Seminole and Martin counties, the clerk, Terre Cass, read.

The high court ruling may have been foreshadowed by a surprising legal step taken by Bush's lawyers Friday morning when they filed papers to supplement arguments made Thursday before the Supreme Court.

In a rare clarification one day after oral arguments, Bush's lawyer told the state Supreme Court it did not have authority to grant Gore's request to set aside Bush's 537-vote victory and order recounts of thousands of disputed ballots.

Gore's lawyers rebutted in a last-minute filing of their own, telling the Supreme Court that Florida law made it clear that "the results of this election — and every election" were subject to judicial review.

An appeal was already being prepared in a third absentee ballot case dismissed Thursday by another local judge, said Alvin Smith, an attorney who represented pP oOida Panhandle voter looking to throw out more than 12,000 votes in that region of the state.