This edition of "Follow the Money" is written by guest columnist Jesse Rutledge, communications director for Justice at Stake.
Dec. 11, 2006
N.C. System for Electing Judges Remains National Model
By Jesse Rutledge
WASHINGTON, D.C. - More than the people of almost any other country, we like elections. We like elections because they provide what President Bush once referred to as an “accountability moment.” With elections, we as voters get the final say in whether a public official is doing a good job or not.
In most cases, we count on elections to put people into office who we then expect to advance the agenda that they campaigned on. Judges are somewhat of an exception, because we elect judges not to bring an agenda, but instead to promise to be accountable to the law and the Constitution.
Nonetheless, North Carolinians, like most Americans who live in states where judges are elected, want to continue to elect their judges. But public surveys show that they don’t want to see judges raising big money and deeply engaged in the partisan politics that comes with the territory when a candidate is running for the legislature. Somehow, that just doesn’t sit right.
This conflict -- between elections and the realities of campaigns -- was recognized by leaders in North Carolina, and that’s why four years ago lawmakers devised an innovative system of campaign reform to keep judicial elections -- while providing an escape hatch for judicial candidates.
The reform was this: let’s keep judicial elections and the accountability moment that comes with them, but find a way so that judges and those seeking to become judges aren’t put into the awkward need of asking lawyers and others who might come into their courtroom for campaign money.
The changes enacted were voluntary: no one could be forced to change the way they campaigned, unless they agreed it was a good idea, too.
Looking around the country -- and to many states not at all far from North Carolina -- it’s pretty easy to make the case that the reforms have worked. How do we know this? More candidates have voluntarily used the system than have rejected it, and voters have voluntarily funded the system (through checking “yes” to the fund at tax time).
The reform package also hoped to keep big money special-interest groups out of judicial elections, which it has mostly done.
But perhaps the best way to show the system has worked is by showing what has not happened in North Carolina. That is, the problems that are now commonplace in many other states have mostly been absent from North Carolina.
As judicial elections across the country descend into costly chaos, North Carolina’s innovative system, which provides full public campaign financing for appellate court candidates, has become a national model by acting as a safeguard against big money and national special interests throwing their weight around.
Campaign finance figures gathered from Supreme Court elections in the 11 states holding such contests this past November indicated that candidates themselves raised about $30 million, a number that could skyrocket when final reports are filed. Candidates for these offices raised record-setting amounts in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Oregon and Washington in 2006.
You can’t run for a public office without raising campaign money, and you can’t raise enough campaign money to run for a seat on a court without having to seek contributions from lawyers, businesses and labor unions.
In these states and others, a growing number of judges feel trapped in a bad system, forced to raise money like big-time politicians and look over their shoulders at special interests. It’s become a trend impossible to wish away. As former California Justice Otto Kaus said: “It is difficult to ignore a crocodile in your bathtub when you’re shaving in the morning.”
Consider Illinois, where Supreme Court justices are elected by geographic district. In 2004, the candidates for one seat raised $9.3 million -- more than was raised in 18 of 34 U.S. Senate races that year. “That's obscene,” said the winner, Justice Lloyd Karmeier, on the night of his victory. “How can people have faith in the system?” In 2006, two candidates for a seat on that same state’s appeals court -- one step below the state Supreme Court -- raised over $3.5 million.
Critics of the changes in North Carolina might be surprised to learn that many other states are carefully monitoring how these reforms have worked, with an eye to importing the solutions to their own states.
Across America, 22 states use contested elections to choose their high court justices. North Carolina is the only state with a system of full public financing, but states from red Montana to blue Washington are already looking to see what they can learn from the experience in the Tar Heel state. In judicial election reform, they should like what they see.
Rutledge is communications director for Justice at Stake, a Washington, D.C.-based group that tracks political and special-interest threats to the courts. He was associate director of the N.C. Center for Voter Education from 2000-2003.
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