judgesonmerit.org

Bill White of the Allentown Morning Call, writing a post-election wrap-up, reiterates his belief that Pennsylvania should use Merit Selection to choose appellate court judges.  He reasons that most voters have little or no information to guide them in making decisions about who should sit on the appellate courts and that political party endorsements play too great a role in influencing who reaches the bench.  He concludes:

So I advocate merit selection for our state judges. It wouldn’t remove all the politics, but at least it would ensure we get competent people in there.

This echoes something we’ve long understood: it’s not possible to take all the politics out of a judicial selection system.  But it is possible to reduce the role of party politics and other factors irrelevant to being qualified to serve as a judge — like fundraising ability, ballot position, and county of residence. It is also possible to emphasize qualifications, skill and experience in the selection process.  Merit Selection is the way to accomplish this.

In a blog post about the Pennsylvania courts, Allentown Morning Call columnist Bill White notes that our system for selecting appellate court judges doesn’t make any sense.  He had harsh words for the electoral process:

[J]udges are selected by voters who have no clue about their credentials and . . . the best way to ensure election is to accept help from political power brokers. Until we switch to merit selection — still political, but much more likely to produce high-quality judges — or at least regional representation so voters have at least a slight chance of knowing something about the candidates, we’ll be left with eenie-meenie-miney-moe and a lousy state judiciary.

The electoral system is not the best way to select judges — good judges make it to the bench despite the system, not because of it.  Under Merit Selection, qualifications, skill, experience and one’s reputation for honesty and fairness would be the factors emphasized in picking judges.