Deciding how best to capture the essence of each of the dozen 2nd Congressional District candidates for tonight's televised forum was a daunting task.

What organizers settled on differs somewhat from the norm.

Rather than ask each candidate the same questions, organizers designed questions specifically to delve deeper into the priority issues put forth by each of them.

The KGMB9/ The Honolulu Advertiser forum is sponsored by The Pacific Resource Partnership.

With a crowded field that includes 10 current or former elected officials, the forum offers the candidates the last televised opportunity to try to distinguish themselves before the Sept. 23 primary.

"We're designing these questions to really dig into the issues pertaining to each candidate, and the issues that matter the most to the voters based on our research and things that we've been hearing," said Chris Archer, KGMB9 news director.

The candidates won't be asked about their position on the war in Iraq, for instance. "You will hear, perhaps, a variation of that question tailored specifically to the candidate, their background and things they have said in the past regarding that issue," Archer said. "They're good questions."

Two-thirds of the questions are being formulated by an editorial board consisting of KGMB staffers, Advertiser political columnist Jerry Burris and PBS Hawai'i political pundit Dan Boylan.

Burris and Boylan are two of the four moderators. The others are KGMB anchors Kim Gennaula and Keahi Tucker.

With only 90 minutes to divide 12 ways, each of the candidates will have 90 seconds to respond to each of three questions, giving each a total of five minutes of air time.

Not all of the questions are coming from the experts. High school students from the 2nd Congressional District were selected to participate and one of the three questions each candidate will answer will come from the students, Archer said.

The questions won't be shared with the candidates ahead of time, so they'll have to answer on the fly. The 10 Democrats will appear in groups of three or four while the two Republicans will be on stage together.

There will be a live audience in the 1,400-seat Hawai'i Theater, and all seats have been spoken for. Each candidate received 100 tickets and the rest have been distributed among community leaders, students, parents and teachers from District 2 schools, and other VIP guests, Archer said.

The forum will be rebroadcast tomorrow at 1:30 p.m. on KGMB, and at 8:30 p.m. on KHET.

Blair said the event is being billed as a debate because candidates will be allowed to respond to previous speakers' comments within the given time limits.