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The amount of money spent on last year’s state Supreme Court election is staggering. With at least $4.7 million raised, our own deputy director Shira Goodman noted the race to be the most expensive in history on a per-seat basis.

Today’s PA Law Weekly (subscription required) takes a look at exactly where all that money came from. While campaign finance reports indicate that defeated Democrat Jack Panella raised more than twice the amount of the victorious Joan Orie Melvin, including more than one million from the Philadelphia Trial Lawyers Association’s PAC, these figures don’t tell the full story.

A separate report compiled by the Campaign Media Analysis Group for Washington-based watchdog Justice at Stake reveals that the Republican Party sponsored an estimated $975,849 worth of television ads for Orie Melvin. The Republican party reported spending over $3 million on political campaign ads last year. The reports do not break down the spending on individual candidates, so exact numbers spent on each are difficult to determine. However, CMAG’s report, which was assembled by monitoring satellite feeds of campaign commercials and determining who paid for the ads according to their disclaimers and where they were aired, is believed to be a conservative calculation.

Charlie Hall of Justice at Stake is concerned that the voting public will not be able to truly see who is paying to support these judicial candidates.

It was a surprise to us that this third party that doesn’t appear on the ballot spent more than the candidate herself. I think this should be a big wake up call to Pennsylvania that the public should really insist on better transparency in campaign finance laws so they know who’s spending money in a campaign.

Yet more than greater transparency will be needed to combat the effect of politics on the bench. Due to the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Citizens United allowing corporations and unions to make direct expenditures to support or oppose political candidates, judicial campaigns are likely to become more and more like other political races even though the role of judges is very different from those in the other two branches.

Political science professor G. Terry Madonna worries that this “tendency will be to demean the judiciary [and] cause the public to have less confidence in the judiciary.”  In Pennsylvania, where faith in the courts has already been severely compromised due to recent scandals, such a development would only further weaken confidence in the system.

Judicial elections are no longer working for Pennsylvania. A change to a merit selection method of selecting our appellate judges is the best way faith can be restored.

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