Hearsay

That elusive goal of achieving some kind, any kind, of merit-based method of selecting judges has not lost its allure among the deeper thinkers of the First and Fourth Estates.

“Merit selection of judges is the official position of the ISBA,” President Bob Downs reminds us in his Illinois Bar Journal President's Page for April.

And so it has been for at least the two decades since President Dick Thies and Gino DiVito championed the cause, convinced the Assembly to adopt it as policy, and partnered with Governor Thompson in a blue-ribbon task force attempt to implement a proposal.

“It is not the total solution,” Downs continues, “but it is a way of shifting the process of picking judges to one less likely to be influenced by money and partisanship.”

Ah, but the case might be made that continuing to give this responsibility to the vast masses of more-or-less informed voters results in quirks and anomalies that can best be described as: very interesting.

In Lake County, two associate judges made successful primary leaps to unopposed 19th Circuit Republican candidacies for full circuit seats in November. But those judgeships may have been eradicated by then.

The legislature established five additional seats last year, in a bill that set subcircuit boundaries for the new single-county circuit to be. ISBA Assembly member Wallace Dunn and George Bridges were among the five candidates who filed for two of them.

In January, however, the legislature reconsidered and pulled the seats out from under them. They sued to remain on the ballot, and a downstate judge ruled temporarily in their favor.

The voters have spoken, yet the case continues, and Dunn and Bridges don't know whether they will become circuit judges or remain as associates.

In Cook County, several candidates for three phantom seats received votes in the primary, but their totals will not be revealed. They filed after three sitting judges failed to declare for retention timely under an election code provision.

The Supreme Court reinstated those three – one of whom had filed for election to her own seat, just in case – but their “vacancies” remained on primary ballots.

Also on Cook County primary slates were candidates who may not know for sure until May whether they won or lost. Boxes of ballots are being reviewed and interpolated with electronic records of varying veracity. Now there's a system that merits remediation.

In the 17th Circuit, two disgruntled voters challenged the candidacy of Associate Judge Ed Prochaska for full circuit in an uncontested Republican primary. Something about filing the wrong statement of economic interest.

Fortunately, the State Board of Elections found for Prochaska, or else the Democrat candidate would have been unopposed in November.

Perhaps strangest of all, 20th Circuit Judge Lloyd Cueto decided he had a better chance of getting at least 50 percent of the votes in an election than the 60 percent he would need for retention.

So, of course, he filed for election to his own seat and was unopposed in the Democrat primary. He has competition in November, though, from a Republican who filed on the last possible day.

Insiders aren't making any predictions on how the voters in our so-called “judicial hellhole” will deal with either this unusual partisan election, or the retention of judges on ballots in both the 3rd and 20th Circuits.

Just think that with an appointive system, we would have missed all this frivolity.

Members of judicial evaluation efforts may take heart in the results of most primary elections for the Cook County bench. In several contests, pluralities marked for candidates who received generally high marks from the bar associations.

Only two of the 16 who refused to appear before the Alliance of Bar Associations were apparent winners. One of them was unopposed, and the other eked out an 18 percent survival tally in a nine-way race. Six of the no-shows finished dead last in their heats.

Endorsements were of questionable value. They went awry for eight candidates who were recommended by the Chicago Tribune, seven who got the nod from the Chicago Sun-Times, and two who were slated by the Democrat Party.

Sadly, a solid string of top bar ratings and newspaper endorsements did not help Martha Mills, a gold-standard Laureate of the ISBA Academy of Illinois Lawyers.

But ISBA Assembly member Ron Nelson, a past president of the Northwest Suburban Bar Association, made the cut, garnering 44 percent of the votes in a four-way Republican subcircuit primary.

The really bad news is that only a fourth of registered voters showed up at the polls, and one-sixth of them skipped the judicial balloting.