Litigation

Retention Elections: The ?New Battleground??

By Peter Hardin

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbhGHLTrObY

A stealth campaign by conservative groups didn’t succeed in ousting two Florida Supreme Court justices, but it was a part of 2010 retention elections that worry some legal observers anyway.

“Retention elections around the country are becoming the new battleground,” said Becky Kourlis, executive director of the  Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System, a Justice at Stake partner. She told the Palm Beach Post why:

“The effort to politicize the judiciary is the most fundamental problem here.”

“To think that we want to create a third majoritarian branch of government and have judges stick their fingers in the air to test which way the political winds are blowing is abhorrent.”

Florida Justices Jorge Labarga and James Perry held on to their seats on Election Day, but Justice Labarga kept his by the lowest approval rate in state history, of 58.9 percent.

With low funding, conservatives in Florida targeted the pair of justices over a court ruling that removed from the ballot a GOP-backed measure intended to derail federal health care legislation. A short ouster video posted to YouTube by the Florida chapter of Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty may be viewed by clicking the image above.

In Iowa, a well-funded and nationally supported campaign to remove three Supreme Court justices was sparked by the court’s ruling that permitted same-sex marriages. The drive succeeded in ousting the trio.

In Iowa, Colorado, Illinois and Alaska, groups pumped in $4.6 million to dump justices up for merit election. That was compared to $2.2 million spent on all retention elections in the past decade, the newspaper said in citing Justice at Stake data.  The ouster efforts in Colorado, Illinois and Alaska did not succeed.

Not all legal observers concluded that a seismic shift was taking place in judicial elections.

Even when groups weren’t targeting judges for removal, judges with retention elections this year did worse than usual, said Bill Raftery of the National Center for State Courts, another JAS partner.

“This was emblematic of a particular year that was anti-incumbent, anti-whoever-happens-to-be-there,” Raftery said. An analysis by his organization is available by clicking here.

Full post as published by The Gavel on November 15, 2010 (boomark / email).