This is going to be brief (cue sighs of relief).
If you live in Illinois, you walk into the voting booth and are confronted by a raft of names you’ve never seen before: the judicial candidates. Many of these are retention votes, meaning you’re voting whether to keep a judge on the bench or remove him or her from it. The only way to get rid of a bad judge in one of these seats is to vote not to retain.
The newspapers often don’t bother to publish endorsements for these seats. The Cook County Democratic Party routinely gives its endorsement to unqualified party hacks. So how are you supposed to keep track of them all?
There’s a website, voteforjudges.org, that rounds up the recommendations of the bar associations in Cook County. From the website:
Judges make decisions about fundamental issues that affect all of us (family life, education, health care, housing, employment, discrimination, civil rights, public safety, etc.), and those decisions can have long-lasting impact. It is critical that our judges make fair decisions based upon open-minded and unbiased consideration of the facts and the law in each case. Judges must know the law, be independent, and be free from external political and economic influences. Voting for qualified judges really does protect the courts – for all of us!
Right now, for some reason that’s not clear to me, it’s only showing the recommendations of two bar associations: the Cook County Bar Association and the Chicago Council of Lawyers. (Other associations whose recommendations have been published on voteforjudges.org are the Illinois State Bar Association, the Asian American Bar Association, the Black Women Lawyers Association, the Decalogue Society, the Hellenic Bar Association, the Hispanic Lawyers Association of Illinois, the Lesbian and Gay Bar Association, the Puerto Rican Bar Association and the Women's Bar Association.) Fortunately, from my point of view, the Chicago Council of Lawyers is the one whose recommendations I value most highly. Calling itself “Chicago’s public interest bar association,” the CCL advocates for fair and efficient administration of justice and systemic reform of the justice system.
Please visit voteforjudges.org before you cast your vote in Cook County.