Sunday’s presidential debate was supposed to include online questions submitted by Americans. But it turns out that not many were asked.
Moderators asked one question that received 13 votes while all of the top 30 questions moderators promised to consider received more than 20,000 votes. The top two questions each received over 65,000 votes.
“At PresidentialOpenQuestions.com, over 3.6 million votes were cast on over 15,800 questions. Tonight, the one they used received 13 votes. Hmm,” Americans for Tax Reform leader Grover Norquist tweeted after the debate.
On Wednesday, the group that organized the online effort, the Open Debate Coalition, launched a petition to push the moderator of next week’s debate, Chris Wallace, to ask the top questions submitted and voted on at PresidentialOpenQuestions.com.
“This was an unfortunate example of cherrypicking by moderators to give their own questions the veneer of representing the public,” the coalition wrote. “Popular questions on guns, Social Security, government reform, student debt, climate, immigration, and other issues went unasked.”
The Open Debate Coalition was formed during the 2008 election cycle and includes: Americans for Tax Reform, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, FreedomWorks, NARAL, Faith & Freedom Coalition Founder Ralph Reed, the National Organization for Women, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, Color Of Change, Numbers USA, Presente, MoveOn.org, Arianna Huffington, former Romney senior aide Mindy Finn, craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Electronic Frontier Foundation President Cindy Cohn, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and many more.
Anita Kumar: 202-383-6017, @anitakumar01
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