The Leagues of Women Voters of Bowling Green and Perrysburg are collaborating on a candidate forum.
A Face2Face: Meet the Candidates is being held on Oct. 13 at the Veterans Building in City Park.
Doors open at 3:30 p.m. for informal conversation with the candidates and the program starts at 4 p.m. Instead of having the candidates in front and the audience in rows of chairs, audience members will sit at round tables, and each table will have a League of Women Voters facilitator and a candidate. Audience members at each table will have about 10 minutes to ask questions of the candidate at their table. At a prompt from the moderator, candidates will move to the next table in rotation and the 10 minute question period will be repeated. By the end of the evening each candidate will have sat at every table, and each audience member will have met every candidate face to face, or Face2Face.
This format was tried in 2023 and was well-received by both candidates and audience. It gets around situations with the previous format where if one candidate for an office does not participate, the other one can’t either. We feel the voters lose out when they can’t hear from both candidates for an office. Another feature of this format is that no one will be the seventh person to answer a particular question.
Audience members who have a particular question should have a better chance of asking that question.
Being invited to participate are candidates running opposed for the following offices:
U.S. House of Representatives 5th District
U.S. House of Representatives 9th District
State Senator 2nd District
State House of Representatives 75th District
Wood County Commissioner
Wood County Recorder
Wood County Treasurer
Candidates running unopposed in this election are invited to meet informally with the public from 3:30-4:00.
Co-sponsors are American Association of University Women Bowing Green Branch, Bowling Green Chamber of Commerce, and BGSU Retirees Association.
