Nation: 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.