Letter to CPD Head Demands Fairness, Transparency
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Janet Brown
Executive Director, Commission on Presidential Debates
1200 New Hampshire Ave NW.
Washington, DC 20036
Dear Ms Brown,
In a spirit of fairness, since you won’t allow us in the debates or release the secret polls that you rely on to figure out which candidates meet your threshold of 15 percent national support, I would like to ask that you allow me, and the three other third party Presidential candidates who are on the majority of state ballots, the common courtesy to at least have a seat at the debates among the audience.
As a secondary point, I would like to ask for you to make public which polls the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) relied upon to determine who is allowed into the Debate. We have reason for concern on this matter, as it appears that some major polling organizations, Gallup to name one that you have used in the past, claim to include third parties, but on closer inspection this is only true one out of every 200 times.
Gallup’s daily tracking poll asks voters if they support Obama, McCain, neither, or someone else. Because millions of Americans don’t even know we or the other third party candidates are running, less than half a percent say someone else. It is an accepted rule of thumb in polling to go from the general to the specific,
not the other way around. As evidence of this, in polls that mention me by name in the primary question, such as the Sept 24 Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, I get 5 percent support nationally. This is still far from the 15 percent threshold that your considerably inflated criteria requires, but it would be rather disingenuous bordering on fraudulent to base a criteria on a threshold in polls, which you don’t even bother to admit may not even be polling the candidates other than those of the Republican and Democratic Parties that created and control the CPD.
For Fairness and the Voter’s Right to Know,
Ralph Nader
Nader for President 2008
P.O. Box 34103
Washington, D.C. 20043
(202) 471 5833
