Democratic Ohio state senator suggests removing party labels for judicial races • Ohio Capital Journal
8 mins read

Democratic Ohio state senator suggests removing party labels for judicial races • Ohio Capital Journal

Kaneb0

In 2021, Ohio lawmakers decided to take on partisan gerrymandering for state Supreme Court and appellate court races. Over the past two cycles, the Democratic nominees for the Supreme Court had done surprisingly well amid Republican dominance up and down the ticket. In 2018, the Democrats picked up both seats, and in 2020 the party took another.

After those races, Republicans still controlled the court, but with only a single-vote majority. Supermajority Republican state legislatures then turned judicial races into partisan contests. Republicans have fared much better since then.

In 2022, Republicans swept all three races on the ballot. This year they did it again.

State Sen. Bill DeMora, D-Columbus, wants to go back to the previous system where judicial races were a nonpartisan affair. Given the Republican Party’s firm grip on every lever of state government and their recent electoral success, he’s unlikely to get many people — something DeMora himself alluded to in his testimony.

“Thank you for testifying on Senate Bill 201,” DeMora told the committee, “the third bill today, which I guess has no chance of getting anything other than a casual three minutes in the spotlight.”

DeMora’s Fall & Republican Resurgence

The reason this year’s Ohio Supreme Court elections were the most expensive in state history, DeMora argued, is because they have been reduced to “proxy battles between Democrats and Republicans.”

State Supreme Court races drew in hundreds of thousands of dollars from foreign donors to support candidates on both sides of the aisle. Those donations were made to secure partisan gains, DeMora argued, rather than to support an individual judge.

“It used to be that our judicial races were contests between individuals who had different opinions about the interpretation of the law,” he said, “and now it’s just a big money party just like any other partisan race.”

DeMora added that the introduction of partisan identifiers has done more than change the face of races on the Supreme Court. It has also discouraged participation in legal contests down a notch.

“There were also 25 Court of Appeals seats up for election two weeks ago,” DeMora said. “Only four of those races were contested statewide.”

Senate Majority Leader Rob McColley, R-Napoleon. (Photo by Graham Stokes for the Ohio Capital Journal. Only publish the photo with the original article.)

Despite DeMora’s complaint, state Sen. Rep. Rob McColley, R-Napoleon, said the change has led to greater participation in these judicial races. Before the introduction of partisan labels, he explained, many voters simply did not vote for the Supreme Court.

“In 2018, the attrition would be 79% of those who threw at the top of the ticket threw it in the Supreme Court race,” he said. “In 2022, after this change, that number increased to nearly 98% of voters who voted at the top of the ticket and cast it in Supreme Court races.”

DeMora pushed back, arguing that the increase in turnout has at least as much to do with ballot placement (the partisan gerrymandering bill also pushed judicial races near the top of the ticket) as it does party designation.

McColley added that a 2014 study by the Bliss Institute63% of respondents pointed to a lack of information about the candidate as the main reason they did not vote in judicial elections.

“When they dug deeper, the best answer to what information you would like was party affiliation,” McColley argued. “And so I think we gave voters more information, and as a result, millions more voted in these elections.”

The problem is, McColley’s memory was faulty. The biggest thing voters said they wanted was information about the candidate’s professional background and views on crime. Of the six types of information surveys asked about, party affiliation came in dead last.

State Sen. Theresa Gavarone, R-Bowling Green. (Photo by Graham Stokes for the Ohio Capital Journal. Only publish the photo with the original article.)

Late. Rep. Theresa Gavarone, R-Bowling Green, argued that the way to take partisanship out of the picture is for judges to run as independents — something that, to her knowledge, had not been done.

“We have a partisan primary, and then to turn around and pretend we’re not partisan in the general seems disingenuous,” she said.

“It clouds transparency, and that’s information voters want to know,” Gavarone continued. “Are you suggesting we go back and all of a sudden pretend we’re not partisan when you get to the general election, when people already have an election, they can run as independents right now?”

DeMora said he would like to do away with partisan primaries as well as party designations in general elections, not to mention an even broader overhaul aimed at reducing partisanship.

“I wouldn’t mind if all the judges have no racial bias,” he said. “Let them be appointed for a certain number of terms, and like other states, if they do a good job, they are reappointed by an entity, whether it’s a panel of judges, other judges or a non-partisan or non-judicial board, or the governor.

How the states are doing

While DeMora’s proposal is unlikely to gain traction, he’s not wrong that Ohio is an extremist. According to a Brennan Center Review of Government Policyonly seven rely on partisan elections to choose their state supreme court justices and appeals court judges. Twice as many fill the Supreme Court bench with nonpartisan elections, but most states use an appointment process.

While states fit into a couple of broad categories, their processes offer a true “laboratory of democracy”—one rat’s nest of subtle variations in selection, confirmation or retention which corresponds to almost as many different approaches as there are states.

Among the jurisdictions that rely on appointments, most give that job to the governor, but Virginia and South Carolina let state legislatures decide. In states where the governor has the honor, they can’t just pick whoever they want. Most states use a nominating commission to develop a short list of candidates, and several of them require the governor’s pick to also face a confirmation vote in the state legislature.

As for additional terms, most states require sitting judges to run if they want to keep their seat, but again, partisan elections are rare — only five states use them. The largest share is 18 states that use retention elections without opposition. Much like Ohio’s referendum, under that model, a sitting judge appears on the ballot and voters decide whether to retain them or not. Another 13 states use nonpartisan elections.

And researchers have found that attaching party labels to the ballot is not simply a matter of partisan advantage. In one 2011 studyshowed law professors Michael Kang and Joanna Shepherd that elected judges were more likely to rule in favor of a particular business interest when industry contributions to their campaigns increased. But most importantly, when they sorted out their data to compare partisan elections with nonpartisan elections, they found a stark divide.

“Campaign contributions by corporate groups are associated at statistically significant levels with legal decisions for business interests only during partisan electionsbut not under partisan ones,” they wrote.

They argued that the role of parties in court selection is “critical” to understanding the link between contributions and decisions.

“In other words,” they wrote, “what matters is not just the amount of campaign money involved, but the level of party involvement in judicial elections.”

Follow OCJ Reporter Nick Evans on Twitter.

YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.

Website https://carnevalestoricocivitonico.it

Related Posts