© Rick Wilking / Reuters U.S. president Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton
A judge in Washington, DC has ordered the Federal Election Commission to review a complaint by the Greens and Libertarians that the 15 percent threshold on third-party candidates to participate in presidential debates was "arbitrary and capricious."
In her summary judgment,
federal District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan ruled on Wednesday that the FEC had to reconsider the legitimate complaints filed by the two political parties about the polling criteria used by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) to keep everyone but Democrats and Republicans excluded.The lawsuit, known as Leveling the Playing Field v. FEC (Case No. 15-cv-1397), was filed in August 2015. In November that year, the FEC
announced it would not change its rules in response to the petition because its regulation is "designed to provide debate sponsors with discretion within a framework of objective and neutral debate criteria, and because the Commission can evaluate the objectivity and neutrality of a debate sponsor's selection criteria through the enforcement process."
The FEC insisted that polling thresholds established by the CPD "can be objective and otherwise lawful selection criteria for candidate debates."
Judge Chutkan was unconvinced of the merit of that argument, pointing to the evidence submitted by the plaintiffs.
To achieve the necessary name recognition and poll support, an independent candidate "should reasonably expect to spend" approximately $266 million on the campaign before the debates, according Dr. Clifford Young.
"This begs the question:
if under these facts the FEC does not consider the fifteen percent polling criterion to be subjective, what would be?" Chutkan wrote in the opinion accompanying the ruling. "Unfortunately, the FEC articulated no analysis, and the court cannot discern the FEC's reasoning."
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