Editorial: Partisan elections politicize judges
Thursday, February 24, 2011
(Updated 3:05 am)
If you stick a partisan label on a judicial candidate, you’ll get courts that are more political.
North Carolina has been moving away from that. It would be a wrong turn to go back.
Yet that’s one of the initiatives Republican legislators are pushing this year. They argue that voters want information about judicial candidates’ party affiliation, and that Democrats removed the labels from ballots because their candidates were losing too many elections.
Those contentions aren’t wrong. But they’re not good arguments for partisan elections.
Voters look for party affiliation when they want a label to guide their choice and they aren’t willing to investigate a candidate’s real qualifications. That’s unacceptable. No one should vote for a judicial candidate who happens to be a Republican or a Democrat but otherwise lacks the proven experience and impartiality to decide cases on the basis of law rather than politics.
A courtroom isn’t like a legislative chamber where everyone wearing one label takes one side of an issue and everyone wearing the other label stands on the other side. Judges aren’t supposed to fall in line with the party that helped get them elected. Enabling voters to rely on party labels will not improve the quality of justice in North Carolina. Just the opposite.
The advocates of partisan elections say voting in judicial races has dropped off since party labels were removed in the last decade. Of course it has. Close to half of North Carolina voters cast a straight-party vote. Those votes don’t count in nonpartisan races. The solution isn’t to add judicial races back into the straight-party vote totals. Instead, voters should look at the judicial voter guide mailed to them by the State Board of Elections, read newspaper articles or editorials about the candidates, or even ask lawyers who might have an informed opinion.
Voters still choose judicial candidates for foolish reasons: gender, the sound or look of a candidate’s name, even alphabetical order. If they can’t do better than that, they shouldn’t vote.
Political parties still push their way into these campaigns, endorsing “their” candidates based on registration. They aren’t really helping by following their usual practice of turning every issue into a partisan contest.
Some candidates themselves promote political views, at least covertly, or use code words to let voters know where they stand on hot-button issues. Those candidates ought to scare away more voters than they attract.
Most judges say there is no place for partisan politics in the courtroom and that a judge’s record should not identify him or her as a Republican or Democrat. If the men and women who serve on the bench don’t rule as Republican or Democratic judges, they should not run as Republican or Democratic judicial candidates. If they do, they create expectations of partisan behavior and politicized courtrooms. Justice should be blind to all prejudice, including party affiliation.