Every two years, people get worked up over the way we elect judges in Texas. This year is no exception, with Sen. Dan Patrick prefiling a bill that would eliminate straight ticket voting because it supposedly harms “good” judges. He’s not the only one – Mike Tolson has a quote in the Houston Chronicle from former Texas Supreme Court Justice Scott Brister, who doesn’t like straight ticket voting:
“In a close county like Harris County is now, being an incumbent doesn’t help you,” Brister said. “The odds are 50-50. You leave your practice and will be making less money, and you have to be constantly worried whether you will keep the job. If you lose after one term, all your clients are gone to somewhere else and you have to build your practice all over again. That makes it real difficult to convince someone to run.”
Methinks Mr. Brister needs to look again at the results – incumbents won across the board in Harris County. Plus he apparently thinks that once elected, you should be there forever, seeing as how you’ve “given up” your client base and all. Ridiculous.
Look, if you want to reform the way judges are elected, there is a very simple way to do it. Move their elections from November to May and make them non-partisan, just like municipal races. And in counties as large as Harris, divide them up into the County Commissioner precincts. It ain’t rocket science.
But it will never happen because political parties rake in most of their cash from the judicial candidates. And I suspect that straight ticket voting for judges will survive for the same reason. After all, if you aren’t asking voters to vote straight ticket Republican judges, there is no need for a joint judicial campaign, thus no need to force the candidates to pony up their life savings to fund it.
Separating judges from straight ticket voting in November elections will not decrease the odds of getting a “bad” judge or three, it would actually give more influence to special interest groups and candidates with deep pockets. Bad idea.
Leif says
Making judicial elections nonpartisan is an even worse idea. That is the single move that could do more to increase the influence of outside interests and rich candidates. With the addition of partisan affiliation, there is at least a minimal identifier of a candidate’s judicial philosophy—we generally know where most Republicans and most Democrats tend to stand there. But making the races non-partisan removes even that minimal indicator. That increases the power of independent groups—and endorsement slates—to affect these races by making them the sole source of information about each candidate. In a county as large as Harris County, that reduces to picking your poison: Let the slate affect the primary and then vote in the general for the party whose attitudes on judicial philosophy you generally support, or let the slate affect the general and let people essentially pick the slate they trust the most and go with it.
Removing information from voters’ grasps is a bad idea. My parents—who still live in Washington in a county whose size, urban proximity, and population are roughly comparable to Montgomery County—had nothing but their candidates’ names and some generic pap from each one about how devoted they were to justice and fairness; they were reduced to calling me to ask for my recommendations on how to vote in their district, superior, appellate, and Supreme Court judicial races. They trusted me to be able to do some quick research to tell who got affirmed or reversed; what their judicial philosophies were; and what some of the code-words and generic-sounding organization names in the candidate pap actually meant. Without me, they would’ve had just the pap, the candidate’s name, the local bar’s recommendations, and the notation of whether the candidate was an incumbent or not.
I know a lot of people in the HBA. It would be nice to be able to target only the most actively involved voters in an off-year, spring election—the ones who typically vote in very-low-turnout races for school board and city council. And the next time there’s a vacancy on the bench, I’m happy to campaign using my middle name to make myself sound less like I just got off the boat from Trondheim. But I don’t see how that’s at all a better system than the one we have now.
Tom says
Without denegrating my state senator, I find it interesting that he wants judges off the straight ticket lever right after his son gets on the bench and will be running in presidential years. At least one Democratic judge agrees with Sen. Patrick but really, that isn’t a perfect solution. Judges need to be non-partisan and we need to find a way to keep good incumbents of either party while allowing voters a way to get rid of bad judges. I don’t have a perfect solution but knocking judges off the straight ticket is a place to start.
This year, straight ticket votes about cancelled each other out and there were about 70,000 undervotes in judicial races, meaning about 70,000 voters just didn’t vote.
What we really need is a way to convince voters not to vote in judicial races where they don’t know the candidates. THat will never happen.
Robert Pratt says
"Ending straight ticket voting for the judiciary is not the solution" – correct but the solution offered is no solution either. There is simply no problem with electing judges as we do now. People get the courts they elect and Party Affiliation is a fine way to judge the general philosophy of a judge. Nothing is perfect.
Mainstream says
My impression is that many judges have left the bench and improved their economic position, both in handling mediations and in receiving offers from major law firms, even if their earlier legal career was at a small or government legal office.
I also share the view that incumbency is certainly an advantage in an election contest, especially where straight ticket voting is fairly balanced.
An alternative to removing the straight ticket just for judges, would be to remove it altogether while keeping the identification of party affiliation beside the name of every candidate on the ballot. In such a system, voters have the minimal information of party identification to the degree that provides a clue regarding political outlook, but must take the effort to cast a vote in every contest rather than relying upon a single mark to cover all 60 or so candidates.
Marvin says
In this case, Sen. Patrick has it right. You would still keep the party labels, just program the machines so the straight party lever does not vote for the judges. You have to make the effort to go through the list, and then you can still vote for your party favorites if you want. There will be an easy opportunity to find the good judges of either party for someone who has done their homework, but the ones who don’t know enough will tend to stop short of the entire list.
Harold Huff says
We should end the straight ticket ballot option altogether. In addition Judicial and County offices should be non-partisan like municipal offices.