I don't buy the notion that Gore necessarily actually won the "popular vote". He carried some states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsisn due to vote fraud. There were precints in Philadelphia in which over 130% turnout. Gore's campaign manager was the son of the formere mayor of Chicago and the brother of the curent one. Chicago is known to have some of the most crooked elections in the US. The Electoral College is deliberately designed to thwart vote fraud.
You know the details. Many west Florida (Panhandle) voters are in another time zone. They did a u-turn away from polling places when they heard the media beating the drum how Gore had taken Florida. Panhandle is Republican. GWBush probably lost 5-10 thousand votes that way. Florida should never have been decided in the courts......blame the mass media.
However one may think about the EC - it is definitely more important to get the voting procedure clean! It´s unbearable for the United States that still dead people votes count or that the list of people who are uneligible to vote (like criminals) is hidden from the public in many states. We don´t have these problems in Europe and therefore consider your voting procedure as inferior. You have too many posssibilities to manipulate elections (and I blame the blue and red side for that). I know you will dismiss it, but being registered from birth till death by the city you live in, and bearing a national ID with your address on it has advantages. We receive a notification a few weeks before our election by mail, then we can send it back and ask for a mail vote or we go to the ballots, show our ID or passport, our names on the voter list is marked and we get our vote. When the ballots close, the number of marked names is counted and must be identical with the number of votes. Then the helping hands in the office count the votes - and we take care that at least one of the two big parties is present. With that easy procedure, we never had any claims that there could be a fraud. Oh, and the right to vote can be taken away by a courts decision, but it must be said in the sentence, and for max. 5 years. This (our) system is different to the US -and ... that´s a point why many many people put the finger on you.