Why is there a “Commission on Presidential Debates” in the first place?
What Constitutional or other authority exists for there to be such a thing? I presume it was not created by State Legislatures, the only bodies with even a shred of authority over the choosing of electors.
To control the outcome of course.
The whole idea of a moderator who asks “secret” questions is a rig on it’s face.
Debates are about an issue or a question that is posed beforehand, and the debaters respond and cross question.
From Wikipedia:
The first televised presidential debates were held between Nixon and Kennedy during the 1960 election. No general election debates were held in 1964, and Richard Nixon refused to participate in debates in 1968 and 1972. Beginning with the 1976 election, the League of Women Voters sponsored the televised Ford–Carter debates, followed by the Anderson–Reagan and Reagan–Carter debates for the 1980 election, followed by Reagan–Mondale in 1984.
After studying the election process in 1985, the bipartisan National Commission on Elections recommended "[t]urning over the sponsorship of Presidential debates to the two major parties". The CPD was established in 1987 by the chairmen of the Democratic and Republican Parties to "take control of the Presidential debates". The commission was staffed by members from the two parties and chaired by the heads of the Democratic and Republican parties, Paul G. Kirk and Frank Fahrenkopf. At a 1987 press conference announcing the commission's creation, Fahrenkopf said that the commission was not likely to include third-party candidates in debates, and Kirk said he personally believed they should be excluded from the debates.
In 1988, the League of Women Voters withdrew its sponsorship of the presidential debates after the George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis campaigns secretly agreed to a "memorandum of understanding" that would decide which candidates could participate in the debates, which individuals would be panelists (and therefore able to ask questions), and the height of the lecterns. The League rejected the demands and released a statement saying that they were withdrawing support for the debates because "the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter."