How can you say that the EC avoids deadlock, and then immediately start talking about Florida? The popular vote in that case was not a deadlock, and would have made for a clear winner with no disputes. The EC is the only reason that Florida's mess even mattered. How many times has the popular vote been close enough to cause such a mess? Zero. How many times has the EC caused such a mess when none needed to exist? More than zero.

Plenty of other countries use a straight popular vote and they somehow manage to avoid all of the problems that EC proponents say the popular vote would cause. It seems obvious that if we were building the country from scratch today, the EC would never even be considered, let alone enacted.