Citizens' Debate Commission

The Citizens' Debate Commission was a nonpartisan organization established to sponsor future general election presidential debates. It consisted of national civic leaders from the left, center and right of the political spectrum who were committed to maximizing voter education. An Advisory Board of over fifty civic organizations, chosen to broadly reflect the composition and concerns of the electorate, stood behind it.

The Commission was formed in Washington, DC, on 12 January 2004, with organizational support from Open Debates, a nonpartisan group led by George Farah. Its mailing address was a post office box in Washington, DC 20036. The logo was supplied by ReclaimDemocracy.org.

The Citizens’ Debate Commission was active in 2003–2004 and did not stage debates after that cycle; the pages on this site are preserved as a historical record.

In 2024, for the first time since 1988, the general-election debates were held outside the Commission on Presidential Debates: the campaigns negotiated directly with CNN, ABC News and CBS News, which hosted them. Our page Presidential debate reform today explains what changed, what did not, and how it compares with the reform case made here in 2004.

In the Commission's own words, the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, which had sponsored the general election debates during the previous four election cycles, failed to adequately serve voters' interests. The Commission on Presidential Debates was created by the Republican and Democratic parties, and the Citizens' Debate Commission argued that it secretly awarded control of the debates to the two major party candidates, limiting voter choice and restricting the subject matter of political discourse.

The Citizens' Debate Commission pointed to a measurable cost: under the tenure of the Commission on Presidential Debates, debate viewership had dropped by more than 25 million viewers between 1992 and 2000. Its stated aim was to reverse that decline by hosting debates that served American voters, not political parties, first.

Democracy and voter education will be restored to the presidential debates through the Citizens' Debate Commission.

• Set fair candidate selection criteria, using the two-prong Appleseed test rather than a threshold negotiated by the major parties.
• Feature innovative and engaging formats, including a real town hall with unscreened questions and the first youth-run debate.
• Resist the anti-democratic demands of participating candidates, with only a limited number of vetoes over moderators and panelists.
• Operate with full transparency, in contrast to the confidential memoranda of understanding of earlier debate cycles.
• Sponsor five 90-minute presidential debates and one 90-minute vice-presidential debate at colleges and universities around the country.

The detailed proposal, with the schedule, the selection criteria and the format reforms, is set out on The Plan. The people who made up the Commission are listed under Members, and the organizations on its Advisory Board are listed on that page.

In February 2004 three Democratic presidential candidates, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton, said they supported reform of the debates through a nonpartisan Citizens' Debate Commission. In March the Commission announced broad civic support from more than fifty organizations. On 24 May it named six colleges and universities as proposed sites for five presidential debates and one vice-presidential debate.

On 12 August 2004 the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Federal Election Commission had acted contrary to law in dismissing a complaint alleging that the Commission on Presidential Debates was partisan. Four days later the Citizens' Debate Commission sent formal invitations to the Bush-Cheney and Kerry-Edwards campaigns. The invitations were not accepted, and the 2004 general election debates went ahead under the Commission on Presidential Debates. The News page lists the press releases and the coverage the proposal drew.

The original citizensdebates.org was a small static site: a home page, The Plan, Members, Advisory Board, News and Contact Us. It stayed online, unchanged, into the 2010s. This restoration reproduces the Commission's own pages from captures held by the Internet Archive, keeps the original addresses working, and adds only short editorial notes that are marked as such. Nothing here is a current statement by the Commission or by any person named on these pages.

Students, debate teams and civics teachers still use the Commission’s proposals as a case study in how public argument should work. If that is why you are here, the same ground rules carry into writing: a guide to the persuasive essay turns a debate brief into an argument on the page, and a writing coach can help a first draft hold its line.