MoveOn Forum Hoped to Evaluate Whether Candidates Obfuscated

Tonight's online candidate forum on Iraq, sponsored by MoveOn.org and attracting all the major Democratic presidential candidates, is a huge technological undertaking for the organization. Framed as a "Virtual Town Meeting," it will feature streaming audio--in most cases live, though Bill Richardson had to record his in advance since he's in North Korea--in which the candidates answer questions generated by MoveOn.org members. Afterward, members can vote online for which candidate's positions they liked the best.

Some of MoveOn's larger ambitions for the project didn't come through this time around. They had wanted to allow listeners to vote on how directly the candidates answered each question, but that won't happen. (The candidates were not informed of this feature, representatives for MoveOn tell News Desk. The reason they scrapped the idea, they say, was technical.)

They had also wanted to enable cellphone voting, American Idol style, and were hoping for streaming video, both things they hope to implement down the road. There are two more such meetings in the works, one on healthcare policy and another on energy and environment.

"The results will go out to all our 3 million members, and there are lots of different ways that we expect that this information will reverberate outward," MoveOn Executive Director Eli Pariser said. "It will be successful if they're responsive to the questions our members are raising."

--Chris Wilson