In The Arena Reform the Presidential Debate Commission

The presidential debates should be among the best live dramas on television, but 27 percent more of the American population watched the three-person 1992 debates than watched the Romney-Obama debates in 2012. To revive the debates, and to make them truly nonpartisan, the presidential debate commission needs to make room for a third candidate on the stage.

The picture that has emerged in recent years is unsettling: partisan campaign operatives openly delivering demands to the supposedly independent commission; big money flowing to the commission’s coffers despite claims that it runs on a “shoestring budget”; and an insular organization that appears to have ignored its public interest commitment by ducking and weaving from hard questions.


While the debates are more than a year away, it is essential that the commission end its stonewalling and implement reforms now. In order to qualify for the debates, under both the current rule and our proposed changes, a candidate must qualify for the ballot in enough states to equal at least 270 electoral votes.

For the 2016 election cycle, universal ballot access would require a minimum of well over 1 million valid signatures from voters across the 50 states — a task that is enormously complex and time consuming. For example, in 2012, an organization met the requirements for ballot access in 41 states, a task that took approximately 2.85 million signatures and 20 months to achieve. Given the demands of ballot access, further delay by the commission essentially codifies the notion that only Democrats and Republicans can become president.

Because of the critical role the Commission on Presidential Debates plays in our democracy, we’ve joined 47 other experts in governance and democracy to ask that the commission reform itself in time for the 2016 presidential election. We have thus far been met with little more than delay tactics.

The outcome we want is simple: to create a viable competition for a third spot on the debate stage. We don’t want a clown show, and we don’t want our debates, which are steeped in years of great tradition, to be derailed. But if a qualified candidate is not allowed to participate in the general election presidential debates, with the vast media exposure and legitimacy they confer, the party is over before it begins.

What we propose is grounded in three core principles that can provide a road map for reform and are easy for the debate commission to implement.

First, there must be a competition — not an arbitrary polling hurdle — open to all nonmajor party candidates. Second, the competition must feature direct voter engagement in order to measure a candidate’s relative strengths and legitimacy. And third, the competition must yield one winner by April 30, 2016, allowing enough time for earned media to boost his or her national name recognition, so that by Election Day it would be equivalent to the Democratic and Republican nominees.

Here’s a picture — inspired by research from some of the leading electoral experts — of how one potential solution could work.

It would take the form of a “ballot access signature competition,” a path that is rooted in the process that every single state uses to qualify candidates for the ballot.

Campaigns would need to garner ballot access through signature drives in enough states to win at least 270 electoral votes. If more than one candidate attempted to gain access to the debates through this path, the candidate with the most signatures would be invited. This competition would be completed and a debate participant announced by April 30.

The competition among candidates to gain access to the debates under such a rule would be vigorous, enabling a legitimate third candidate to claim a spot on the debate stage. The winner of this ballot-access-signature competition would need to collect some 4 million to 6 million signatures from a broad cross section of Americans — a clear demonstration of popular appeal. The cost and scale of that endeavor would not be insurmountable but is substantial enough to ensure that only someone with significant fundraising, operational capacity and public support could win.

Signature drives have an extensive track record in our democracy. They have been used for many, many years to determine who gets on the ballot, and when a state or local initiative has sufficient support to be on the ballot. By contrast, polling is never used to qualify candidates or referendums for ballot access.

The stakes are too high for the current system to continue. The debate commission must stop ducking and embrace reforms by early summer or we will be stuck with yet another “ closed-door masterpiece” instead of dynamic debates that provide Americans with the political choice they are desperate for. This is stifling the kind of competition that our own parties need in order to move closer to the public mood on important issues.

Lee Hamilton is a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, and Vin Weber is a former Republican congressman from Minnesota and an adviser to Jeb Bush. Both are supporters of Change the Rule.