Back in July, about 3,000 people submitted videos for the first CNN/YouTube Democratic debate, and about 40 video questions were shown to the candidates. The questions were selected by CNN producers based on unknown criteria (you gotta believe “makes good television” was pretty high up there).

We made it clear at the time that we thought there was a better way, and that the public should be invited to vote on the videos and the most popular should be presented to the candidates. The wisdom of the crowds, we said, would ensure that quality questions would be asked.

To prove this, 10Questions co-creator David Colarusso invited the public to vote on the questions on his Community Counts site; as he predicted, the most popular questions didn’t involve cyborgs or snowmen, but addressed a range of thoughtful and diverse topics.

Now that the second CNN/YouTube debate is upon us, we’re faced with the same policy from CNN: they’ll choose the videos, lest they be faced with horrible videos featuring stuffed dragons and a talking Mr. Potato Head.

David’s too busy being a high school physics teacher and maintaining 10Questions to recreate the Community Counts magic, but in his “spare time” (those boring hours between two and four am?) he put together a spreadsheet giving the details for all 4,927 submissions. It lists the videos by number of views, favorites, ratings, comments, honors, and links.

There are so many ways to cut up and play with this data, but for now we’re just listing the 40 most-viewed videos to see what the YouTube community (remember them?) liked the best.

And guess what we discovered? No cyborgs! No snowmen! Only two of the top 40 videos stick out as possibly too weird to show the candidates (one person dresses up like the devil, another wears a Principal Skinner Mr. Burns mask and mumbles unintelligibly).

In fact, that vast majority of these top videos ask important, cross-partisan questions. It will be interesting to see which ones end up on CNN tomorrow night.

We've divided the videos into groups of 10; click the link at the bottom of the page to view the next page.

View the first 10 —>

You can also go directly to page one, page two, page three, and page four.