ARE THE CONVENTIONS REPRESENTATIVE?

NO constitutional provision or federal law says how American political parties should select their presidential candidates. The system has evolved almost by happenstance. Its processes, often contradictory and in some instances so convoluted that both lawyers and politicians are hard put to explain them, are a bewilderment of accretions. It is through a combination of primaries, party caucuses and state conventions that delegates to the national conventions are chosen.

This year, the whole un-system is being put to question by the critics of the "old politics," mostly Eugene McCarthy's dissidents, the now leaderless forces of Robert Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller's supporters. They condemn it, sometimes indiscriminately, as an outworn relic of bossism and a negation of the popular will. Since the delegates to the national conventions do not directly represent the voters, runs the simplest argument, the conventions conducted by the parties do not really pick candidates who are the people's choice.

There are indeed ample injustices in all of the disparate rituals through which convention delegates are picked. State primaries, originally intended to circumvent the political manipulations of party leaders at state conventions, are themselves often open to distortion. Some, like Oregon's open primary, are sufficiently broad-based to reflect more or less accurately the voters' will. Yet the results of primaries can be nullified by the unit rule, which applies in a number of states and binds all of the state's convention delegates to vote in a bloc at least through the first ballot. Thus imposition of the unit rule can deny a candidate who barely missed winning a majority in the primary any delegate support from the state during the national convention.

"Weird Perversion." In some states that do not have primaries, delegates to the national conventions are picked, in effect, by a caucus of top politicians.

In Georgia, for example, Governor Lester Maddox, a Wallace supporter, sat down with State Party Chairman James Gray to handpick the 64 delegates to the Democratic National Convention. "What it boils down to," says Democratic Congressional Candidate Charles Weltner, "is a weird perversion of the one-man, one-vote doctrine wherein one man has one vote, and that man is Lester Maddox." John Howett, an Emory University professor, and Businessman Richard Marsh filed suit charging that they are "thwarted from participation in the democratic process at its place of quintessence."

Other states go through the motions of holding state conventions to pick their national delegates, but the results can be just as rigged. In Mississippi, with a Negro population of 42%, only three of the 44 delegates selected to go to Chicago are Negroes. Civil Rights Leader Charles Evers, one of the three, has resigned and plans to challenge the delegation at the convention. Court fights to unseat regular party delegations have been mounted throughout the nation, mainly by Negroes and McCarthy supporters.

The problem is that the delegation system was not constructed to reflect a state's population in proportional terms. Rather, it was designed to reward those who, through special influence or strength of numbers, have come out on top of the political heap.

Exaggerated Virtue. State conventions may or may not be representative of voters' will, since they depend as much upon the strength of that will as upon the honesty of the party leaders. Vermont's system of town caucuses to choose delegates to the state convention, which in turn selects national convention delegates, is a comparatively direct process. But in many states, such as Illinois, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's Democratic fief, the decisions of convention delegates are directly dictated by party bosses.

Yet for all the dissatisfaction with the existing political machinery, it remains generally responsive to change. What the mechanism needs in order to operate fairly is, above all, the active commitment of the electorate. This has often been missing. The dissidents' frustration today is in part a function of youth, but it has also encompassed many of their elders who have come abruptly to a state of political awareness.

That shock of recognition--at the traumas of Viet Nam, riots in the cities, assassinations, the unresponsiveness of Congress--has led many to exaggerate their own political virtue. McCarthy loyalists have passionately protested the imposition of the unit rule in contests in which they have lacked a majority, but they have been just as ruthless as their opponents in invoking the unit rule when it worked in their favor. While the new politics of McCarthy has a refreshing directness, his followers have yet to establish that they themselves are above the petty manipulations that they condemn.

National Primary? A national primary might be one solution to the contradictions of the present setup. Many students of politics, including University of Chicago Historian Richard Wade, have advocated such a primary. The parties could meet in the spring solely to write their platforms. In September, Democrats, Republicans and independents could hold separate nationwide primary elections, and the winners could meet six weeks later in the national election. Because campaign expenses for such primaries would be prohibitively high, the Federal Government would probably have to make political contributions taxdeductible. An alternative suggested by Louisiana's Senator Russell Long: each taxpayer would pay $1 into a national political campaign fund. In practice, a petition signed by a meaningful percentage of voters would have to be required in order to prevent marginal or merely eccentric candidates from qualifying for the funds.

Such a system--which has been seriously proposed for more than fifty years--may yet become a reality in the 1970s, although the prospect seems remote at present. One major problem: the anachronistic and potentially mischievous Electoral College should be abolished before the U.S. seriously contemplates instituting a national primary. Otherwise, the nation would have a popular primary without a purely popular general election.

In 1968, the process of election is already radically changing. Television is becoming more and more the principal channel for communication between candidate and voter. Meanwhile, for better or for worse, the traditional mix--along with the explosive admixture of the disaffected--will govern this year's electoral process. "The system has grown up in a haphazard way," Historian James MacGregor Burns remarks, "but God takes care of drunks, children and American politics."

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