Debates are rigged

The presidential debates will be a failure. Not because of the moderators’ questions, or the candidates’ answers, or the size of the television audience. The debates will enable millions of Americans to learn something useful about the two people who want to lead their country.

Rather, the debates will fail because they have been designed—rigged, even—to benefit the two major parties and networks instead of the voters. It’s not too early to start thinking about 2020 and how to avoid a repeat of the mistakes made this year by the Commission on Presidential Debates.

The problem is that the commission is beholden to the two major parties. It remains—unofficially—their handmaiden. Its co-chairs are former officials of the two parties’ national committees.

This year, a group of civic and military leaders from across the political spectrum led a campaign to open the debates to independent or third-party candidates, but the commission once again set eligibility criteria that all but ensured their exclusion.

This month, the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential nominee, former Massachusetts governor William Weld, suggested that the commission’s tax-exempt status could be revoked, since the group effectively functions as an appendage of the two major parties. It’s a fair point.

The commission also seemed more concerned with not interfering with the networks’ usual prime-time programming than with selecting dates that would maximize viewers and listeners. Partly as a result, each presidential debate will conflict with a nationally televised NFL game.

Four years from now, it would be far better for debates to be organized by a more open, independent and publicly accountable body.