You’re Not Going to Like What the State Legislature Just Did to Our Judicial Elections

I get that your top priority in life isn’t keeping up with judicial legislation, but you need to know what just happened.

Yesterday — during a two-day special session — we were asked to vote on a bill that had a brand new section. It hadn’t been heard by any senate committee. Came out of nowhere.

It cancels all judicial primary elections next year.

Here’s the language:

Think about that. Primaries exist to winnow the field. Now that we won’t have any, you might have 20 people on the ballot running for Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court. Good luck making an informed decision.

What’s worse, the winner could end up getting only 15–20% of the vote. Needless to say, it doesn’t exactly build faith in our judicial system when we have judges winning elections despite the vast majority of people voting for someone else.

And, of course, this confusion will make re-election easier for incumbent judges, who are more likely to have bigger warchests and higher name ID.

Well, it just so happens that an incumbent Republican Supreme Court Justice is running for re-election next year.

Maybe this is a coincidence. So we asked, on the senate floor, why they would cancel the primaries. We heard two responses:

1) Republicans are considering redistricting all District and Superior Court judicial districts in January (during another special session) and they want time to do that.

The small problem with that explanation is that there’s no reason why redistricting in January wouldn’t allow for primaries in August/September.

The BIG problem is that they can’t redistrict our Court of Appeals and Supreme Court — those are statewide elections. So that can’t be the real reason.

2) We also heard that in January the majority party might propose putting a constitutional amendment on the ballot (when the judicial primaries would otherwise be held…) that would eliminate judicial elections entirely and transfer the power to select judges to… any guesses?… the majority party in the legislature.

The small problem with that explanation is there’s no reason why we need to preemptively cancel all our judicial primaries now on the basis of a decision that might be made in January. We could just wait until January.

The BIG problem is simpler: What if the public shoots down the constitutional amendment? Why would we decide today to cancel all the primaries before we know the outcome of a vote that might be held next year? (And how likely is the public to hand over its power to elect judges to the legislature, anyway? We only have a 29% approval rating.)

Let’s recap: We’ve cancelled the primaries for all of our judicial elections and no one can give us a good reason why. For the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court, no one can even come close to giving a good reason. It came out of nowhere — during a special session — and wasn’t allowed a committee hearing in the senate.

This is the type of thing you should have on your radar because it looks like the majority party is attempting to draw a net around the judicial branch. We could see judicial redistricting designed to favor Republicans, and/or a judicial selection process controlled by Republicans, and/or a deliberately chaotic general election process that would favor the re-election of a Republican Supreme Court Justice.

Head’s up.