I just look at their political party.

I look at bar association ratings.

I pick the familiar-sounding name.

No clue as to any of the candidates, so not voting.

Take a minute and vote. And if you have another reason that’s not listed there, let us know in the comments.

“Trust in the courts is eroded when judges have to dial for dollars from parties who appear before them,” said Bert Brandenburg, executive director of Justice at Stake, and we couldn’t agree more. Poll after poll after poll has shown that the public is convinced that the decisions of elected judges are influenced by campaign donations.

States have tried several ways to combat this perception. North Carolina has a first-in-the-nation system of public financing that allows judicial candidates (who can raise a small initial fund) to run for the bench without having to assemble huge campaign warchests. Recently, court rules in New York were modified to prevent court administrators from assigning a case to a judge if any of the lawyers or participants in the case donated $2,500 or more in the previous two years.

Our opinion is that the best way to restore trust in the impartiality of Pennsylvania’s appellate courts is to relieve our appellate court judges and justices of the burden of campaign financing in the first place. If campaign donations don’t play a role in putting appellate judges on the bench, then the public doesn’t have to wonder if those donations had an influence on the way those judges rule. That’s why we believe Merit Selection is a superior solution.

71 percent of Democrats, and 70 percent of Republicans, believe campaign expenditures have a significant impact on courtroom decisions. All told, 71 percent of voters share this assessment; only 23 percent believe campaign expenditures have little or no influence on elected judges.

Justice At Stake explains in its press release:

The American mainstream wants courts to be off-limits to special-interest money and partisan politics. . . . The new polling shows that the desire for impartial courts is broad and bipartisan.

We have written before about the growing public perception that justice is for sale.  This perception is powerful and problematic, even if it might be erroneous.  That is, even if no judge ever were influenced by a campaign contribution, the belief that he or she could be persists.  It is not possible to disprove the belief.  This in itself weakens our courts, because our courts can only function when they have the trust and confidence of the people.

The only way to overcome the perception is to break its foundations — and the only way to break the perceived link between money and justice is to get money out of the system.  This can best be achieved by getting judges out of the fundraising business by using a selection system that does not require money at all: Merit Selection.

A scan of the limited excerpts AJP was willing to release show the arguments against merit outnumbering arguments for—a polling no-no. And rather than fairly testing the other side, the poll waters down the traditional arguments for merit selection into bland, less appealing language. It’s also unclear why they polled only 800 voters, compared to the Gallup-standard 1,000 for a national survey.

Questions have been raised in the past by PoliPundit.com and Media Matters for America about the methodologies used by Ayres, McHenry & Associates, Inc., the firm behind the AJP poll. A PoliPundit.com review of various polling firms noted that Ayres McHenry goes against the American Association of Public Opinion Research’s written Code of Professional Ethics and Practice by not providing information about the pollster’s weighting or breakdown of samples.

We know that reasonable people disagree about how best to pick judges, but this poll should not be relied on as an accurate picture of the state of American public opinion.