What was the Advisory Board of the Citizens' Debate Commission?

A roster of some sixty civic organizations that publicly backed the Commission's 2004 effort to replace the Commission on Presidential Debates. It was distinct from the Commission's governing board of 17 commissioners, though the two overlapped: nine commissioners led organizations that also sat on the advisory board.

How could Greenpeace and the Conservative Caucus sit on the same board?

Because the Commission's single demand was procedural: that presidential debates be run by a sponsor the two parties did not control, with unscreened questions, follow-ups and inclusion of candidates at five percent in the polls. Groups that agreed on nothing else could endorse that. Reclaim Democracy, which helped found the Commission, stressed that the work was unrelated to any candidate or party.

Did any of these organizations take legal action over the debates?

Yes. The National Voting Rights Institute was co-counsel to the third-party candidates in Hagelin v. FEC, the suit that won a partial district-court ruling on 12 August 2004 before the D.C. Circuit reversed it on 10 June 2005. Howard Phillips, founder of the Conservative Caucus, was one of the plaintiffs. The Commission's own FEC complaint, MUR 5414, was dismissed 5-0 in December 2004.

What became of the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling?

It became Stop Predatory Gambling in 2008, when Les Bernal took over as national director; Taylor Branch spoke at the September 2008 launch. The organization traces itself to the Rev. Tom Grey and the anti-casino campaigns of the early 1990s and remains active under the new name.

Is the Citizens' Debate Commission still active?

No. It staged no debates in 2004 or in any later cycle, its website stayed frozen with 2004 content in archive captures through 2016, and Open Debates' domain no longer serves the organization's site. This page is a historical record.

Advisory Board — Citizens' Debate Commission

Organizations on the Advisory Board

The following civic organizations served on the Advisory Board of the Citizens' Debate Commission. The list is reproduced in the order and wording of the original page.

20/20 Vision
Accuracy In Media
Alliance for Better Campaigns
The American Cause
Appleseed Electoral Reform Project
Ballot Access News
Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law
Center for Food Safety
Center for Reclaiming America
Center for Rural Strategies
Center for Voting and Democracy
Citizens for Participation in Political Action
Citizen Works
Common Cause
Commonwealth Coalition
Conservative Caucus
Declaration Foundation
Democracy Matters
Democracy South
Democracy Unplugged
Demos
Downsize DC
Earth Island Institute
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting
Fannie Lou Hamer Project
Federation for American Immigration Reform
Free Congress Foundation
Free Press
Friends of the Earth
Fund for Constitutional Government
Global Exchange
GRACE Public Fund
Grassroots Unity
Greenpeace
Independent Progressive Politics Network
Infact
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
Judicial Watch
League of Rural Voters
MassVOTE
Midwest Democracy Center
National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling
National Coalition for the Homeless
National Priorities Project
National Voting Rights Institute
The National Youth & Student Peace Coalition
National Youth Advocacy Coalition
Native Forest Council
New Road Map Foundation
Ohio Citizen Action
Public Campaign
Rainforest Action Network
Reclaim Democracy
RenewAmerica
Santa Monica Ranked Voting
Student Environmental Action Coalition
Texans for Public Justice
Tikkun
US English
The Voting Rights Project of the Institute for Southern Studies

How the board was assembled

The Commission described its Advisory Board as over fifty civic organizations that broadly reflect the composition and concerns of the electorate. The press release of 8 March 2004 announcing broad civic support named the groups as reflecting a wide range of political beliefs and causes, from protecting the environment, to improving democracy, to combating judicial activism, all wanting to improve the state of the presidential debates.

The spread is deliberate. Environmental groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Rainforest Action Network sit alongside the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Judicial Watch, the Free Congress Foundation and the Conservative Caucus. Election-reform bodies such as Common Cause, the Center for Voting and Democracy, Public Campaign and the National Voting Rights Institute share the list with Accuracy In Media, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting and Free Press, who rarely agree on media questions. The National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling, later renamed Stop Predatory Gambling, is among the single-issue groups.

The advisory board sat beneath a smaller governing body. Reclaim Democracy, which says it helped initiate the Commission, published the inaugural board of 17 commissioners: among them John B. Anderson, former congressman and chair of the Center for Voting and Democracy; Chellie Pingree, then president of Common Cause; Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch; Tom Gerety of the Brennan Center; Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation; Dan Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform; Norman Dean of Friends of the Earth; Angela Bay Buchanan of The American Cause; Larry Noble, former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission; Jehmu Greene of Rock the Vote; and George Farah of Open Debates. Harvard Law Today described the same body in September 2004 as leaders from 17 major civic organizations across the political spectrum. Nine of those 17 commissioners led organizations that also appear on the advisory list above, which is why the two lists overlap so heavily.

Who the organizations were

Most of the sixty groups were small advocacy shops, but the coalition was anchored by a dozen institutions with long records, and reading them side by side shows what the Commission was trying to signal.

Selected advisory organizations and their independent profiles
Organization	Profile	Later history
Common Cause	Government-reform watchdog founded in 1970 by John W. Gardner, a Republican who had served in Lyndon Johnson's cabinet	Still active
Brennan Center for Justice	Law and policy institute at NYU School of Law named for Justice William J. Brennan Jr.	Still active
Demos	Think tank founded in 2000 working on democracy and economic policy	Absorbed the National Voting Rights Institute, which is now described as its predecessor
Center for Voting and Democracy	Founded in 1992 as Citizens for Proportional Representation; Rob Richie executive director	Renamed FairVote
Public Campaign	Campaign-finance reform group pressing for public funding of elections	Its action fund merged into Every Voice in 2014
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting	Progressive media watchdog founded in 1986 by Jeff Cohen and Martin A. Lee; publishes Extra!	Still active
Accuracy In Media	Conservative media watchdog founded in 1969 by Reed Irvine	Still active
Free Press	Media-reform advocacy group, later a leading voice for net neutrality	Still active
Judicial Watch	Conservative government-oversight group founded by Larry Klayman; led by Tom Fitton since 2003	Still active
Free Congress Foundation	Conservative think tank founded by Paul Weyrich	Renamed American Opportunity after Weyrich's death in 2008
Conservative Caucus	Grassroots conservative lobby founded in 1974 by Howard Phillips	Phillips was a plaintiff in Hagelin v. FEC, the 2004 suit over CPD partisanship
Federation for American Immigration Reform	Immigration-restriction group founded by John Tanton	Still active
Friends of the Earth	Environmental organization founded in 1969 by David Brower	Still active
Greenpeace	Global campaigning network founded in Canada in 1971	Still active
Tikkun	Progressive Jewish and interfaith quarterly magazine	Wikipedia now describes it in the past tense

The point of listing Accuracy In Media next to Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, or Judicial Watch next to the Brennan Center, was not that they agreed on anything else. The Commission's argument, as George Farah put it to Harvard Law Today, was about transparency: the two parties negotiated secret agreements every four years that dictated how the debates would be run. A coalition that spanned Paul Weyrich and Greenpeace was meant to show that objecting to that arrangement was not a left or right position. Reclaim Democracy's editor's note on the proposal made the same point from the other side, stressing that the work was unrelated to any presidential candidate or party.

The breadth also had a practical purpose. The Commission on Presidential Debates had been defending itself since 1988 against the charge that it was bipartisan rather than nonpartisan, and The Connection recorded in June 2004 that the complaint Farah's group filed with the Federal Election Commission rested on exactly that distinction. Sixty organizations from both flanks were the Commission's standing evidence that a genuinely nonpartisan sponsor could be assembled. The FEC did not accept the legal argument: in Matter Under Review 5414 it voted 5-0 that there was no reason to believe the CPD had broken the corporate-contribution rules, and in June 2005 the D.C. Circuit upheld the FEC's parallel dismissal of the third-party candidates' complaint in Hagelin v. FEC, in which the National Voting Rights Institute, an advisory board member, was co-counsel to the plaintiffs.

The National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling

One name on the list looks out of place among democracy and environmental groups, and its presence is a useful marker of how wide the Commission cast its net. The National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling was organized in 1994 around the Rev. Tom Grey, a United Methodist minister from Rockford, Illinois, who had first fought a proposed casino in his own town and became the national spokesman of a movement that had been forming since the early 1990s as state and community leaders resisted commercialized gambling.

The organization's own history records that it changed its name to Stop Predatory Gambling when Les Bernal became national director in 2008, and that the historian Taylor Branch, biographer of Martin Luther King Jr., gave the keynote at the launch of the new name in September 2008. Wikipedia describes the same transition as the coalition becoming part of the Stop Predatory Gambling Foundation in 2008; the group's history page and a 2021 profile of a long-time member both treat it as a renaming of the same movement. Either way, the 2004 name on the Commission's list is the one the organization used at the time, and the successor body is still active.

Why a gambling-reform coalition cared about debate format is not stated in any source we could find. The most likely reading, and it is an inference, is that single-issue groups whose concerns never surfaced in party-scripted debates had the most to gain from a format with unscreened audience questions and follow-ups; the Commission's own press release framed the advisory board as groups that wanted their issues heard.

Editorial note

The list above is the version captured by the Internet Archive on 4 September 2013. It differs slightly from the list of supporting organizations in the Commission's March 2004 press release: Rock the Vote, the Youth Vote Coalition and the Center for Study of Responsive Law appear in the press release but not on the later board page, while the Center for Reclaiming America, Conservative Caucus, Democracy Unplugged, Downsize DC and Santa Monica Ranked Voting appear only on the board page. Several of the organizations have since merged, renamed themselves or closed; the names are left as the Commission published them.

The profiles in the table are drawn from the organizations' own histories and from their Wikipedia entries as of October 2026, not from the Commission's site, and are limited to facts those sources state. The count of nine overlapping commissioners is our own tally from the Reclaim Democracy board list against the advisory list. The Commission's claim that the board reflects the composition and concerns of the electorate is its own characterization and is reported as such.