This week’s debate between Rep. Gary Peters, D-Bloomfield Township, and Rocky Raczkowski, Farmington Hills, the Republican challenger for the 9th Congressional seat, lasted only about an hour but it took literally weeks to set up and organize.

The main purpose of the debate was to give residents of the district, which includes most communities in central and eastern Oakland County, a chance to see the two candidates discuss important issues face to face. Debates have become a staple in politics these days and considering the heated race, a debate was more than appropriate.

Finding a location and setting a date and time for the debate were important but the top priority was how to conduct a “fair” debate. The venue, in this case the Oakland County Board of Commissioners auditorium, took only a phone call or two and finding a mutually convenient date and time was just a matter of both candidates checking their schedules.

But when you talk about being “fair,” there are other considerations that take more discussion, time and effort. For example, the auditorium held about 250 people. About 50 seats were needed for Oakland Press,Community Media Network staffers and miscellaneous guests. CMNtv livestreamed the debate on The Oakland Press website and it was also taped for rebroadcasting on local public television access channel 18.

So, how do we fill the 200 seats? Open the doors at 6 p.m. and just let the general public in? It was one alternative but it wasn’t really favored by either candidate or The Oakland Press. The main problem here was what if one side or the other got their supporters their first and thus filled most of the seats? It just wouldn’t fair.
Another avenue was to give each side 100 seats. However, a third alternative was used and it came from the candidates’ themselves. We asked both sides what they wanted to do and each said give us 50 seats and open the other 100 to the general public.
So, that’s what we tried to do but we still had a major problem — what was the fairest way to fill those 100 seats? The candidates were going to give us a list of 50 names with addresses so we could check them off at the door.

But what about the other 100? Remembering the chaos that developed at town hall meetings over the past two years, we decided just opening the doors to the general public wouldn’t necessarily work. We might end up drawing a large, over-flow crowd of angry people who couldn’t get in.

Some type of reservation system seemed to be called for and we selected online registration. The debate was going to be live on the Internet so filling the seats through an online registration system seemed prudent.

It had some problems but it generally seemed to work. People were told in an online news story that if they wanted a seat in the debate, they had to register online. The first 100 to register were sent confirmation notices by e-mail.
There probably is a better way to do this but we couldn’t figure it out at this time. Our main objective, as I said, was to be “fair” and also to avoid the chaos that we saw so often at town hall meetings.

To this extent, we were successful. Both the Peters and Raczkowski supporters, generally, were well behaved and we were able to keep the focus on the candidates.