Yes, the NORC ballot study did show that Gore got more legal votes than Bush did, and one of the WaPo stories about the vote count was even honest enough to admit that fact in the second paragraph.
The story that I saw in the NYT was essentially the same as what ran in the LA Times and some Florida paper and one other. It was framed such as to reveal only at the end of the article that Gore got more votes, and to make that fact seem irrelevant, and I swallowed it at the time. It was only after I very reluctantly went to see "Fahrenheit 9/11" that I learned that law school professors condemned the Bush v. Gore decision and that 9/11 had totally pre-empted the fact that the NORC study found that Gore got more votes.
I wouldn't vote for Gore largely for the reasons you cite, and I wouldn't vote for Bush either. I was inclined in 2000 to regard Republicans as reasonable and rational people and probably would have voted for McCain had he been on the ballot. He wasn't, so I didn't vote at all. I didn't even know Nader was running.
Of course after Bush took power it was clear that the Republicans' presumed rationality and reasonableness caused them to put their own economic and family interests above national interests such that they were unwilling to defend the Constitution, liberty, or even simple human decency from the Bushcist assault.
I read the Dershowitz book and the Bugliosi book on the 2000 "selection" and was convinced. I checked the question out with a prominent lawyer I knew and he confirmed it publicly while speaking before dozens of people.
The details of the RFK and MLK assassinations are anything but old news. Few people know that in the RFK case more bullets were fired than Sirhan's gun could hold, and about the teenager's photos shot from a tabletop that would have told the whole tale--photos the State of California lost. Few people know about the MLK family's civil suit in Memphis against Loyd Jowers and the jury's verdict in that case and all the B.S. about James Earl Ray. I know about it because of an article in the Chicago Reader way back, I guess when Jowers was on TV.
Obfuscation on the JFK is all the more reason that we need to start early to prepare to shed light on the MLK and RFK. We need to do so in a manner that sidesteps the "conspiracy buff" label that has hurt both the JFK and the 9/11 movements.