Another election year where I can find basically no information about any of the judges running for office.
You would think that they would have some sort of at least rudimentary campaign information, such that you could know like... their positions on issues and their track record as judges?
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@pganssle Considering that in most states the people cant even vote for judges at all I'd say your lucky to have them on the ballot at all.
@freemo I guess? Doesn't seem like a meaningful choice when you cannot find information about these people and literally a million people vote anyway!
This is "pick a hand", not meaningful voting. Just seems like a waste of time.
Still, maybe we're better off. It's not clear to me that election of judges is a particularly good idea.
@pganssle Not really, every decision a judge has ever made is public. so not sure what information your lacking but its certainly there. From your post it seemswhat you'd prefer is some sort of campaign website or something where candidates try to "sell" themselves to you. Personally I am kinda glad to hear there is none of that and your are forced to look up actual public record on your own to make a decision. I kinda wish the election of presidents were like that, no information other than their public record and its on you to research that.
With that said a judge's job is to be impartial and not to allow their own opinion of right and wrong to be applied bt rather to apply the law as it is written, impartially. As such I'd say even if a judge did have a website that indicated what their policies were and their agenda the very nature of a judge saying "these are the principles I believe in and will push for in my career" should disqualify a judge in a first place, any judge worthy of election should basically say "I have no policies within my career and will follow the law to the letter"
@pganssle But the point im making is that a judge should not have a position of any kind when it comes to their professional career.. A good judge has only one position, whatever the law says.
As for having some trouble looking them up, I could possibly help with that, what state are you in, court records should be searchable, should be possible for yout o pull up a list of cases the judge was on and read their final notes easily enough.
@freemo There are many judicial philosophies, and judges also have different different approaches to sentencing or any of the other aspects of their job where they have discretion.
Do they believe that long prison sentences are appropriate for drug possession? What is their approach to setting bail? What do they think of geofence warrants?
There is a lot of room for reasonable disagreement on first points.
@pganssle Thats very fair, and yea there are a lot of things judges can have opinions on where the law either isnt explicit or even just on matters of interpretation of the law. For example how they might handle jury nullification which is routinely strictly prohibited but the law isn't explicitly against it.
This is, I think for a judge to really express the sort of opinions/stances that they are allowed to have would also result in them needs to talk about their stance in a more technical way that may be hard for most people to understand. People are simple they want to hear things like "I'll be tough on drugs" and that sort of campaigning just doesnt line up well with a judge I suppose.
@freemo Also I'm in the 11th judicial district of NY. There are around 18 people running for 9 spots.
I wasn't able to find lists of cases for these people last time around, and I'm not especially interested in spending hours on it anyway, considering how unimportant my vote is with the hordes of party-line voters.
I think the fact that no one has bothered putting together voter guides or information about this, and that even candidates with no record seem to not campaign *at all* indicates that these are not properly contested elections and the outcome isn't really in doubt.
@freemo I haven't been able to find that information. I tried last year (without a LexisNexus subscription), but I obviously put in more effort than 99% of other people did, and was largely frustrated.
It's not a good sign that no one even feels the need to give a summary of their positions (I don't trust any politician, but I can at least find out who they are targeting, broadly speaking).