An article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel focuses on the rule allowing candidates to join political parties, but we’d like to discuss the rule change that will now allow judicial candidates to personally solicit campaign contributions.  Pennsylvania has a rule in place similar to the one struck down in Wisconsin that prohibits judicial candidates from personally soliciting campaign funds.  Instead, they must create campaign committees to handle the fundraising.  But Judge Crabb points out that the use of campaign committees does not solve the problems inherent in fundraising for judicial elections:

Defendants may mean to say that a campaign solicitation from a judicial candidate is more coercive because of the possibility that the potential donor will find herself in that candidate’s court after he is elected.  If that is so, defendants give no reason to believe that the problem is solved by the use of campaign committees.  As plaintiff and other courts have pointed out, a campaign committee does not stop a candidate from discovering who donated and who did not, rendering illusory any belief by the potential donor that he is freer to say no to the committee than the candidate himself.

Judge Crabb also rejected the argument that using campaign committees for fundraising helps increase public confidence:

To the extent judicial fundraising undermines confidence in the judiciary, it is a result of judges’ deciding cases involving those to whom a judge is financially indebted and may be again at the next election cycle.  Neither defendants nor the cases they cite identify any reason to believe that voters are less suspicious of such a relationship simply because the contribution request is signed by the committee chairman rather than the candidate.

In Wisconsin, judicial elections will not look more like elections for other public offices.  But for a position that’s so different from that of other public officials, perhaps it’s time to explore making the selection process for judges totally different.  It’s time to stop electing judges.