7 U.S. States so far, and possibly more will be presenting more than a single candidate for their vote in the Electoral College.  This apparently isn't unprecedented and the primary manner of resolving this is, according to the U.S. Constitution, that the Electors selected to cast their votes are delegated by each State's Legislation.  This is intended to generally reflect popular democratic opinion because State Representatives are most numerous and closest to the people than the other 2 branches of government.

The primary reason there's been a conflict this election cycle appears to be that the selection of Electors for most States has been determined by a relatively automated "system" of precedent which implicitly cedes electoral powers of State Legislative bodies to "it".  I believe most everyone is simply trusting that the voting "system", whatever it is, works and that appears to even include many State representatives, but technically they retain the right, under the U.S. Constitution to select Electors and this right is being exerted for this election due to much skepticism over the reported popular votes.

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To look forward a bit, this opens up many questions about how to view media and government as well.  Does democracy, as its often currently portrayed, serve us well, or does it cause possibly unnecessary conflict?

The U.S. is a Republic of States that are ideally quite independent with the Federal Government only being involved in a few areas, one of them is resolving disputes between States, but over time power has tended to coalesce at the Federal level and things have shifted toward top-down governing instead of bottom up.  That's where a lot of problems arise.

I think this election has brought a lot of attention to what's going on with "the show" - who/what determines what it is and should the channel be changed?

An idea to help address some of this is succession - States (or even smaller areas) could become independent similar to how the U.S.S.R. separated, and they've done rather will since then.  Ultimately, this might not even be much of a choice because it doesn't seem like "the status quo" is a sustainable institution, at least not with maintaining the general direction things have been heading.