The Plan

The Citizens' Debate Commission aimed to sponsor five 90-minute presidential debates and one 90-minute vice-presidential debate in each general election. That is two more presidential debates than the three the Commission on Presidential Debates had typically staged.

On 24 May 2004 the Commission announced six proposed sites and dates for the 2004 series, all at colleges and universities.

The Commission adopted criteria developed by the Appleseed Citizens' Task Force on Fair Debates, a project of the Appleseed Electoral Reform Project at American University Washington College of Law. The Task Force consisted of civic leaders, professors and elected officials, including John C. Brittain, Dean of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law; John Bonifaz, Executive Director of the National Voting Rights Institute; Steve Cobble, former Political Director of the National Rainbow Coalition; Edward Still, Director of the Voting Rights Project of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law; and Rob Richie, Executive Director of The Center for Voting and Democracy.

The Appleseed criteria invite every candidate who is on enough state ballots to win an electoral college majority and who either:

1. registers at five percent in national polls, or
2. registers a majority in national polls asking eligible voters which candidates they would like to see included in the presidential debates.

The intent is to let popular third-party challengers take part without drowning out the two leading contenders. Applied to past elections, the test would have produced a short list each time.

Both prongs are rooted in democratic principles and federal law. The five percent threshold matches the public financing threshold for minor parties, the only legislative standard for measuring the viability of non-major parties: Congress codified five percent in the Federal Election Campaign Act, and taxpayers finance candidates whose parties attract five percent of the popular vote. The second prong, support for inclusion from a majority of eligible voters, is inherently democratic.

The Appleseed proposal predates the Commission. FairVote, the successor to the Center for Voting and Democracy, records that the Task Force advocated the five percent polling threshold before the 2000 election, as an alternative to the 15 percent bar the Commission on Presidential Debates first adopted that year. The CPD's own history confirms that its 15 percent rule, averaged across five national polls, dates from 2000 and that no candidate, not even a major-party nominee, receives an automatic invitation.

The Commission advocated the following format stipulations for every future presidential debate series:

• Follow-up questions must be permitted in every debate.
• At least one debate must include candidate-to-candidate questioning.
• At least two debates must include rebuttals and surrebuttals.
• Response times must not be overly restrictive.
• Candidates may exercise only a limited number of vetoes concerning the selection of moderators and panelists.

Across the five presidential debates the Commission proposed four basic formats.

Every line of the plan answers a specific grievance against the Commission on Presidential Debates. The CPD was incorporated in the District of Columbia on 19 February 1987 with the backing of Paul G. Kirk Jr. and Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr., then chairmen of the Democratic and Republican national committees, and it has sponsored every general election debate since 1988. Before that the League of Women Voters ran the debates; in 1988 the League refused to go on under terms the two campaigns had negotiated between themselves, with its president Nancy Neuman saying the League would not be an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.

The Commission's founder and executive director, George Farah, laid out the case in No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates, published by Seven Stories Press on 6 April 2004. The publisher's summary states the book's thesis: each cycle the two parties draft a memorandum of understanding that the CPD must accept before the nominees will appear, and those agreements typically exclude third-party candidates and bar direct candidate-to-candidate questioning and cross-examination. Farah reproduced earlier memoranda in the book, and The Connection reported in June 2004 that the Commission had released the 1988, 1992 and 1996 agreements.

The 2004 cycle supplied a live example. The Bush and Kerry campaigns signed a 32-page memorandum on 20 September 2004, negotiated for the two sides by James Baker and Vernon Jordan. NPR's Talk of the Nation and Fox News both reported the 32-page figure; Fox noted it was one page longer than the 2000 agreement but carried many more restrictions on format, audience participation and the moderator. Farah told Democracy Now on 28 September that the town-hall audience had to submit questions in advance on index cards, that follow-ups were limited, that candidates could not question each other and that answers were capped at 90 to 120 seconds. Editor and Publisher, citing USA Today, reported that both campaigns had asked the four moderators to sign the memorandum, and that Charles Gibson was expected to pre-select the St. Louis town-hall questions and cut off anyone who departed from the submitted wording.

The plan's five format rules are, point for point, the inverse of the 2004 memorandum: mandatory follow-ups, candidate-to-candidate questioning, rebuttals, generous response times and limited vetoes over moderators.

The schedule answered a different complaint: audience decline. Harvard Law Today, profiling Farah in 2004, cited his figures that average viewership fell from 66.2 million for the two 1988 debates to 40.6 million for the three in 2000. Five debates in varied formats, including a youth debate, were the Commission's answer to that trend; whether more debates would have reversed it was never tested, and this page records it as the Commission's argument, not an established result.

The six-site schedule above never took place. The CPD staged its usual four events: presidential debates at the University of Miami on 30 September, Washington University in St. Louis on 8 October and Arizona State University on 13 October, and the vice-presidential debate at Case Western Reserve University on 5 October, with only George W. Bush and John Kerry meeting the 15 percent threshold. The Wikipedia account of the 2004 debates records the Commission's alternative as proposed but not carried out, and credits it and allied groups with the pressure that led the campaigns to publish the 2004 memorandum before the debates rather than after.

The legal track ran in parallel. Open Debates and Farah filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission on 19 February 2004 (Matter Under Review 5414) arguing that the CPD was party-controlled and so could not lawfully stage corporate-funded debates; the FEC voted 5-0 that there was no reason to believe the CPD had broken the corporate-contribution ban, with its final certification dated 13 December 2004. A separate complaint by third-party candidates John Hagelin, Ralph Nader, Patrick Buchanan, Howard Phillips and Winona LaDuke produced the one court win reformers saw that year: on 12 August 2004 the US District Court for the District of Columbia granted their motion in part against the FEC's dismissal, but the ruling was stayed on 6 October and the D.C. Circuit reversed it on 10 June 2005. Co-counsel for those plaintiffs included the National Voting Rights Institute, whose founder John Bonifaz sat on the Appleseed Task Force.

Reception split along predictable lines. The Harvard Crimson's editorial board endorsed the Commission in April 2004 and hoped it would take sponsorship from the CPD. CPD board member Antonia Hernandez, quoted by the Center for Public Integrity, answered Farah directly: the 15 percent threshold might be disliked, but it was clearly articulated and any candidate who met it got in. The Center's 2008 investigation found the CPD took in over 4.1 million dollars in 2004, more than 93 percent of it from six unnamed donors, the opacity the Commission's plan was built to contrast with.

The schedule, criteria, format rules and four formats reproduce the plan as published on citizensdebates.org and captured by the Internet Archive in 2013; the text had not changed since 2004. The 2004 site table is taken from the Commission's press release of 24 May 2004. The original page spells the Center for Voting and Democracy director's name as Rob Ritchie; it is given here as Rob Richie, the spelling used by the organization itself.

One discrepancy is worth flagging. Reclaim Democracy, which helped initiate the Commission, published an earlier version of the proposal calling for four presidential debates chosen by a two-stage poll; the Commission's own site settled on five. We read this as the plan evolving between the founding in January 2004 and the May site announcement, but no source says so explicitly. Claims above about the CPD's motives are the Commission's and Farah's, and are attributed as such.