The electoral college is an extraordinarily complex mechanism for selecting a president. State and national laws drawn to implement the electoral college system have only added to the complexity—and the risks of a malfunction. The allocation of electoral votes among the states may not accurately represent the citizens resident in those states. Electors are not wise elites, and they may make errors or violate their charges when casting their votes. The constitutional provisions and laws required to implement the electoral college are open to multiple interpretations and may well involve Congress and the courts in partisan wrangling over which candidate won a state and which electoral votes to count. Their decisions may misrepresent the public’s wishes. Donald Trump’s attempts both to create alternative slates of electors and to reject certified electors from states won by Joe Biden could only occur because there was an electoral college. The absence of a right to vote in presidential elections is certainly inconsistent with our notions of democracy. Similarly, the selection of the ultimate choosers of the president—electors—by party committees is contrary to our notions of transparency and popular participation. Allowing a state legislature to choose the winning slate of electors of a state makes a mockery of popular selection of the president.

For present purposes, I take “America’s Unwritten Constitution” to refer (at least in some measure) to the norms, conventions, and practices that have developed in America to give meaning to, and fill in the gaps of, the constitutional text that was penned in 1787, ratified by a requisite number of states shortly thereafter, and formally amended by the Bill of Rights in 1791 and seventeen times during the two-and-a-quarter centuries since. One important constraint on the nation’s Unwritten Constitution is that is must, at some acceptable level, accommodate itself to the written document. A related feature of the Unwritten Constitution is that, as with the formal text, abiding aspects of the unwritten version need to be anchored in some kind of political foundation. These two features of the Unwritten Constitution – a fidelity to the document itself and a grounding in democratic processes – can be helpfully appreciated by examining another crucial component of today’s Unwritten Constitution, and one as to which federal courts have generally been much less central in determining the meaning and operation of the written Constitution’s provisions: the way we select Presidents in America.

At least 18 months before each presidential election, prospective candidates for the highest office in the United States have, since 1972, flocked to the otherwise unsung midwestern state of Iowa. All of these challengers hope to jumpstart their campaigns with a victory in the Iowa Caucus, held on a single frigid winter evening prior to the upcoming November election. It must have taken astonishing foresight and planning for a small state like Iowa to wangle the first-in-the-nation presidential contest, right? On the contrary! The origin of the Iowa Caucus turns out to be a case study in circumstance and happenstance rather than foresight and planning. Furthermore, the subsequent evolution and likely demise of the Iowa Caucus appear to be highly subject to the influence of accidental and unintended consequences.

This chapter underscores the utility of a “history from below” approach. Crowd action dispels historical marginalization and state propaganda, making women and men—not states or powerful people—the central agents of history making, and allowing a more nuanced understanding of events. Studying the crowd enables the reader to understand the unique opportunity for mobilization presented by Iran’s 2009 presidential election. The disputed election results prompted a week-long uprising that provoked a crackdown by the state. The chapter outlines how one continuous uprising morphed into many, and how Iran’s political calendar was usurped by the uprising for renewed social movement activity, with the crowd co-opting some of the most politically charged days from Iran’s revolutionary past to evade the security climate and protest the state. Friday sermons, the anniversaries of the US embassy seizure and Ayatollah Beheshti’s assassination, and Student Day, along with revolution-era strategies of action, such as the night-time chants of “Allahu akbar,” all became part of the uprising’s repertoire.