EDITORIAL: Voting on Alaska judges matters — and here’s how you can learn more about them

It happens every election: You’re in the voting booth filling in ovals, patting yourself on the back for being a knowledgeable and prepared voter. You power through the U.S. House race, as well as the Alaska Senate and House races. You’ve even read up on the ballot measures, so you don’t have to rely on the paragraph of explanatory text to know how to cast your votes there (or maybe you do need that paragraph to remind yourself — no judgment).

Then you get to the judges.

For many Alaskans, judicial retention elections might as well be the part of an old map that says “Here be dragons.” Even relatively well-informed voters often aren’t aware which judges are up for retention votes, or how they would judge their performance if they did know. And that’s a shame because voters have an essential role in maintaining Alaska’s judicial branch. Here’s why understanding state judicial elections is important, and where you can get good information about the judges who will be on the ballot on Nov. 5.

A well-designed, non-political process

Alaska benefited from its status as the 49th state to enter the union — our constitutional framers were able to look at what worked well and what didn’t in other states when it came to the judicial selection and retention process. Instead of having voters elect judges directly or letting the governor pick them personally, the delegates chose to create a panel — the Alaska Judicial Council — split between professional attorneys and members of the public, who would make recommendations from which the governor could choose. For the 65 years Alaska has been a state, that system has kept our judges uniquely well-insulated from partisan politics. And although you might think that lawyers and members of the public wouldn’t see eye to eye about which judicial candidates were best suited for the job, the council’s votes have been overwhelmingly aligned, with 6-0 and 5-1 votes making up a whopping 84% of the more than 1,500 recommendations in the past 40 years.

And judges are still accountable to the people under Alaska’s system, as voters can choose whether to retain judges at the end of each of their terms, which vary in length depending on which court they serve. Even Alaska’s Supreme Court justices are subject to retention elections, a system many people doubtless wish was the case for the federal courts.

Know your judges

Given the number of judges up for retention each year, the Alaska Judicial Council recognizes that it would be unrealistic for individual voters to be able to research their performance; most of us don’t spend much time at the courthouse. So the council gathers a performance evaluation on each judge, polling attorneys who appear before them, court employees and law enforcement/probation officers. The survey is exhaustive and goes out to hundreds of people, who score the judges’ performance on the metrics that matter most within the judicial system: fairness, impartiality, attentiveness, intelligence and other criteria. The Judicial Council provides the full data from those surveys, along with its overall recommendation on whether a judge should be retained, on its website.

Why it matters

Despite the wealth of information about judges supplied by the Alaska Judicial Council, there’s a definite tailing-off of votes for judges compared to the higher-profile races on the ballot. That has the potential to become a problem for the state because of pockets where organized efforts to reject all sitting judges have taken root. While it’s fine to oppose a judge’s retention for a principled reason, the out-of-hand dismissal of all judicial candidates would have catastrophic effects on our state’s justice system, resulting in huge delays to pending cases and even the potential mass dismissal of cases because of the inability to guarantee defendants’ right to a speedy trial.

The thoughtless attempt to cast out judges is corrosive, too, as it displays a callous lack of faith in Alaska’s judicial branch, which — compared to the state’s legislative and executive branches — is a model of effectiveness. Faith in the judiciary is a cornerstone of our political system, and if that becomes as partisan as the other branches have, it will have severe negative impacts on how well the system operates and the outcomes it gives us.

So take a little time this year and read up on the judges who are up for retention this year, and be sure to fill in your whole ballot. This system works best when we all have skin in the game, and it’s not too much to ask to keep Alaska’s most functional branch of government running.