f someone tried charging $25 per vote to help elect a president, he would earn himself universal contempt and possibly even a jail cell.

But in Iowa today they are charging $25 per vote to help nominate a president. A lot of people are taking it to be a serious exercise in democracy.

One reporter says George W. Bush ''must win'' the Republican Party straw poll at the University of Iowa in Ames this evening and Lamar Alexander ''must do well or die.'' Another reporter says the straw poll could supplant next year's Iowa caucuses in narrowing the field.

Such comments should be ridiculous 15 months before the next election - and would be, except that the people taking the event most seriously are the candidates themselves.

Bush has predicted victory and is spending heavily to produce that result. Pat Buchanan has suggested that some candidacies may end tonight. If the straw poll does have tangible impact, it will be only because the contestants agreed to be measured on this bizarre scale.

Big money is far more likely than big ideas to be the winner of the straw poll, which favors organizers, TV ads, mailings, transportation, and entertainment, all of which can be purchased. A planned debate before the straw poll was canceled because too many of the leading candidates refused to participate. Yet most long-shot candidates are working the straw poll because the compressed primary season next spring will be even harder for them.

A straw in the wind indicates which way the wind is blowing, but only at that moment in that place. A straw man is a scarecrow - something pretending to be what it is not.

A straw poll is similar. Tonight's event in Iowa may give a few thousand paid-for participants more than the snapshot significance they deserve. In this badly contorted presidential season, disfigured by big money and a botched calendar, it may be politics, but it is not democracy.