Last year, a consortium of Ohio newspapers sponsored a general election U.S. Senate debate and invited only the Democratic and Republican Party nominees into that debate. The Socialist Party nominee, Dan La Botz, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, because the sponsors had not set any objective standards on who could qualify for that debate. But the FEC took no action, so early this year La Botz sued the FEC.

Here is the 34-page La Botz brief, which was filed on September 23. The FEC asked for more time to respond, and the court granted the request. The FEC brief is now due October 11. This is an interesting lawsuit. Generally, debate sponsors are sophisticated enough to set objective criteria before issuing invitations to the debate. This is often a requirement that a candidate poll at some particular level of support. But the Ohio debate sponsors did not do that; they just said they were only inviting the two candidates who “obviously” had the most support. Furthermore, even if that could possibly be considered an “objective” criteria, the debate sponsors did not make this criteria public, before they set up the debate.