Fact-Checking John Kasich's Claim on Contested Conventions

WASHINGTON (CBS News) - After a big win in his home state of Ohio, Republican presidential candidate and Ohio governor, John Kasich, appeared on this week's broadcast of Face the Nation to talk about his path to the Republican Convention this summer. Kasich, having only won one state so far in the Republican Primary, will be hoping for a contested Republican Convention this July, as it is impossible for him to get the required 1,237 delegates to clinch the Republican nomination.

It is also impossible, at this point, that Kasich will go into the Republican Convention with the most amount of delegates, as Republican frontrunner Donald Trump has continued to dominate the field so far this primary season.

Host of Face the Nation, John Dickerson, asked the Ohio governor why the candidate with the most amount of delegates going into the convention should not be awarded the nomination.

"We've got rules as to how many delegates you ought to get." Kasich responded and added, "If you go in way ahead, you're likely to be picked." Kasich would later say to Dickerson that, "In the ten contested Republican conventions, you know that the leader going in only got picked three times."

Later in the broadcast during the Political Panel, Susan Page of USA Today fact checked the governor's statement saying, "There's been one contested convention since we went to the modern primary system and it went with the frontrunner going into the convention; that was Gerald Ford in 1976."

What Kasich left out is the significant rule changes made by both the Republican and Democratic Parties after a tumultuous Democratic Convention in 1968. The Democratic Party created the McGovern Fraser Commission to create a new set of rules for the following 1972 Democratic convention and many of these rules were put in place by the Republican Party as well.

One of the most significant rules adopted by both parties bound delegates to their states' vote, as opposed to allowing them to vote however they wished in the first round of each party's respective convention.

Since both parties enacted this rule, the 1976 republican primary between former California governor, Ronald Reagan and the then current president Gerald Ford referenced during the Political Panel by Susan Page, has been the last convention where a candidate did not have the sufficient amount of delegates required to win the nomination. As Page noted, Ford, who came into the convention with the most amount of delegates, would eventually win the nomination.