Courts keep trash off ballots. Good.

ORLANDO — Florida judges keep removing constitutional amendments from your November ballot.

They took steps to knock off four just last week. Good. Many of these things were garbage in the first place. Actually, they were garbage sandwiches — trashy proposals sandwiched between better-sounding ones. Their authors hoped you’d swallow the whole thing.

Take, for instance, the “public schools” amendment. It already sounds great, doesn’t it? Everyone likes schools!

And parts of this amendment were designed to appeal to the masses — term limits for politicians and civics classes for kids.

But there was also a provision to let charter-school operators, shady or otherwise, set up shop without the normally required permission from or accountability to local school boards.

That was the garbage in your garbage sandwich.

One thing has nothing to do with the other two. Why should someone who wants more civics classes be forced to also allow publicly funded charter schools to escape local accountability?

It would be like Publix telling you that, yes, you can buy a gallon of milk — but only if you also purchase a 12-ounce can of Spam.

It’s a non sequitur — which is why watchdog groups, legal scholars and editorial boards described this amendment as an attempt to deceive.

Last week, the Florida Supreme Court agreed. It supported a lower-court ruling that said the amendment “fails to inform voters of the chief purpose and effect of this proposal” — which was, of course, trying to shove that charter-school

garbage down your throat.

Backers of the trashy amendment reacted with predictable whining.

Erika Donalds — a school “choice” advocate appointed to the Constitution Revision Commission by House Speaker Richard Corcoran — blamed “activist judges” for denying citizens a chance to vote.

No, Mrs. Donalds. You and your peers on this panel (appointed to suggest changes to the constitution every 20 years) screwed up by passing a garbage amendment. If you’d had the courage to offer up your plan to strip county school boards of local control as a standalone amendment, none of these bundling issues would be a concern.

But you didn’t. Instead, you tried to sneak it in — and now you’re whining about being caught.

But the schools amendment is just one of several trashy amendments.

Lower-court judges have already ruled that three more amendments should be off the ballot.

One attempts to provide death benefits to the families of service members and first responders killed on duty (Sure!) — while also changing the laws that govern the state’s community colleges (Um … what?).

The two things have about as much in common as fine art and dill pickles.

Another combined a proposal to ban off-shore oil drilling with new regulations on vaping inside privately owned businesses.

In knocking that one off the ballot, Judge Karen Gievers described the two proposals as “independent and unrelated.”

The Florida Supreme Court will probably have the final say on whether those two measures stay off the ballot — plus another Gievers knocked off involving property rights and (unrelatedly) the way criminal statutes are enforced.

Even if these amendments aren’t all deemed unconstitutional, they’re bad policy.

Members of the state’s Constitution Revision Commission — largely appointees of Corcoran, Gov. Rick Scott and Senate President Joe Negron — argued they were trying to do voters a favor by combining all these unrelated proposals to prevent “voter fatigue.”

Apparently you wimpy voters are easily exhausted. Few people bought that explanation — which is why the League of Women Voters of Florida sued. League president Patricia Brigham called the school amendment “blatantly and unconstitutionally misleading.”

Good for the League for standing up for voters’ rights.

You deserve an honest and straightforward ballot. And the fact that this commission full of political appointees was either unwilling or unable to provide you one is just more evidence that it’s a flawed idea to ask politicians and their buddies to mess around with the constitution every 20 years.

Once the courts have made final rulings about which issues appear on the ballot, I plan on running a column that breaks down all the proposals in layman’s terms — including the straightforward ones, such as the effort to automatically restore voting rights to non-violent former felons who’ve paid all their debts to society. (The League has already published its own voters guide at lwvfl.org/amendments.)

But for now, judges are whacking away at this ballot. And for that, we should all be thankful.