judgesonmerit.org

In an interview with The Iowa Independent, officials shared that fair courts advocacy group, Justice Not Politics, is “preparing for a fight to keep politics out of the retention vote.” The fight is expected to surround the retention election of Iowa Supreme Court Justice David Wiggins. Like three justices ousted in the 2010 retention election, Wiggins was part of the Court’s unanimous decision in 2009 to uphold gay marriage. Bob Vander Plaats, chief executive of The Family Leader, successfully led the 2010 campaign to vote the three justices off the bench and has indicated that conservative groups will likely turn that effort toward Wiggins in 2012. However, this time Justice Not Politics and gay rights advocacy organization, One Iowa, will be among those ready to defend with a powerful weapon: education.

“We want to get information out there about our judicial system and the purpose of a retention vote,” said Connie Ryan Terrell. “There was a lot of deliberate misinformation (about the courts) given by Bob Vander Plaats in 2010.” One Iowa Executive Director Troy Price added, “Right now, we intend to continue notifying our members of attacks on the courts, and to counter the messages from those trying to inject politics into the courts.”

Ryan Terrell explains that judicial retention elections should be “based on how well [judges] do their job, and if they based their decisions in accordance with the constitution. It’s not supposed to be about if you agree or disagree with their decisions.” In order to protect the independence of our judiciary, the public must remember to keep politics out of retention elections.

Sometimes, we’re asked whether it’s possible to fix the electoral system, rather than changing to Merit Selection. Our critics often argue that we’d do better to improve voter education when it comes to judicial elections. We agree that voter education is a critical issue, and PMC spends considerable time, energy and resources on voter education initiatives during judicial election cycles. But, we remain convinced that even greatly improved voter education isn’t enough to salvage the elective system. We’re not alone in this assessment.

Blogger David Giacalone at f/k/a parses a discussion about the benefits of increased voter education, and reasons that Merit Selection is the best way to overcome the influence of money on judicial selection.