The present foofarah in Florida doesn't seem that remarkable to me. There was a very close election, and the leading contestants are doing the usual: demanding recounts and a close examination of the procedures involved. This happens on a local level all the time, as one would expect. I doubt if such scenes are confined to the United States.
The situation has revealed some of the benefits of the Electoral College (benefits from a liberal point of view, that is). For one thing, it has made it seem as if individual votes are important; this will give many participants satisfaction even if it is an irrational belief. There is little fear of their doing the math. Second, it tends to limit the damage of very close results. In the unlikely event that an election were as close as Florida's on a national level, we would be going through the recounts and challenges all over the country, not just in Florida. Third, chaos-theory fans will be happy to see information flowing up from a very local level to a global level, courtesy of the Electoral College -- for instance, we all now know about the funny ballots in Palm Beach County and have heard the story about Black voters being turned away elsewhere -- these apparently minor things are now affecting big deals all over the earth that would normally take no notice of them. (This point is somewhat related to the desire of the Framers to set up a system which would reinforce the identity of the states, that is, localism, even if they did not think in terms of chaos theory.) The ability of the very local to affect the global is an important source of energy and information for global entities.