Electoral College and EC Vote tracking (Score 1)

Being a numeraholic, it's been great following all the different tracking sites. And it was interesting to discover that electoral-vote.com is the work of a relatively well-known geek. Now all of America is asking "What's a flash crowd?" :-) But is the value of the polls and the tracking sites much more than their entertainment value? What real difference would it have made if all the numbers had just been made up? And is the Electoral College a serious, democratic way of electing the leader of the free world? Especially in a country where the real election is run so incompetently that it isn't much more reliable than the opinion polls... To show you what I mean, I've made a kind of parody of the whole thing at http://www.geocities.com/dadge.geo/ElecColl.htm. What do you think? Have a fun evening, Adrian