Mark Everson, a former IRS commissioner who is seeking the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission on Monday challenging the method Fox News is using to select candidates for Thursday night's first primary debate.
Everson, who headed the IRS under President George W. Bush and launched his campaign in March, said he is being unfairly excluded from the debate, reported The Washington Times.
He claims that Fox News has not met two election law requirements found in Title 11 of the Code of Federal Regulations. The first says that the debate host can not "structure the debates to promote or advance one candidate over another." The second says "staging organization(s) must use pre-established and objective criteria to determine which candidates may participate in a debate," according to The Washington Post.
"In view of the urgency of this matter," the complaint to the FEC concludes, "Mark Everson asks the Federal Election Commission to intervene on an expedited basis and rule that Fox News Network, LLC (a), has violated 11 C.F.R. §110.13, and (b) should be compelled to include Everson in the August 6, 2015 candidate forum in Cleveland, Ohio."
Fox News announced earlier this year that it will hold one prime time debate Thursday night, limited to the top 10 best-polling candidates. Fox later announced that it was adding a separate on-air forum earlier Thursday for any candidate that didn't make the top 10 but scored "1 percent or higher in an average of the five most recent national polls."
Then the network scrapped the 1 percent requirement for the forum, instead deciding to include "all declared candidates whose names are consistently being offered to respondents in major national polls, as recognized by Fox News."
Everson took issue with the change in standards, in particular, the word "consistently," according to USA Today.
"By discarding the 1% threshold for participation in the Fox debate you have recognized that polls are not reliable indicators of future electoral success at this early stage of the Republican race," he wrote to Fox News. "It is inconsistent and arbitrary to then insist that to be included a candidate must be 'consistently being offered to respondents in major national polls, as recognized by Fox News.' I urge you to reconsider this standard."
An expert the Post spoke with, Alan Schroeder, professor of journalism at Northeastern University, says the effort its unlikely to succeed.
