Candidate’s job title on ballot is an issue in race

Political candidates in California can use up to three words on the ballot to describe their current or recent “principal profession, vocation or occupation.” When Alameda County voters elect a new Superior Court judge on Nov. 3, their choices, according to the ballot descriptions, will be Elena Condes, “trial attorney,” and Mark Fickes, “civil rights attorney.”

Fickes’ selfdesignation, approved by local elections officials, isn’t farfetched, but it’s open to debate: A former prosecutor, he now works at a law firm that handles a variety of civil litigation, including a number of discrimination cases he’s tackled in the past few years. Several commentators say it’s an illustration of the need for voters to do their own research on candidates in lowprofile races.

“It’s hard to tell voters who are so overwhelmed already, now you have to do a spreadsheet of your judicial candidates,” said Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Law School professor in Los Angeles whose specialties include election issues. “But that’s where it leaves us.”

Fickes, an Oakland resident and UC Hastings

law school graduate, began his legal career as a Santa Clara County prosecutor in 1995, and later was on the legal staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Since 2014, he has been a partner in Cannata, O’Toole, Fickes and Olson, a small San Francisco law firm.

In the past few years, Fickes said in an interview, a substantial number of his clients have been employees, renters, smallproperty owners and others claiming discrimination under federal civil rights law because of their race, age, ethnicity, national origin or sexual orientation.

One client, Fickes said, claimed to have been targeted for unfounded disciplinary investigations at work for being nonwhite and gay. Another said she was fired because of her Asian

Pacific origin. Another client, a Laotian immigrant in Lake County, was initially accused of environmental pollution, but said his foes later stole his property, sold it and painted a swastika on a tree, Fickes said.

He was also one of the lawyers for Joanne Hoeper, a San Francisco deputy city attorney who was fired in 2014 after investigating questionable city payments to plumbing companies. A judge found that Hoeper had been a victim of retaliation and awarded her more than $5 million in damages and attorneys’ fees. Fickes said he considered it a civil rights case for whistleblowers.

“My practice is diverse,” but civil rights cases represent “the majority of what I’ve done over the past several years,” Fickes said. “I stand 100% behind my ballot designation.”

Such designations have been challenged in other elections — Rep. Devin Nunes, RTulare, successfully defended his selfdescription as a “U.S. Representative/Farmer” in 2018 on the grounds that he earned some income from farming, though he no longer owned a farm. And Rep. Gil Cisneros, DFullerton (Orange County), won election in 2018 after a lawsuit that forced Democratic rival Sam Jammal to drop his “civil rights attorney” ballot label because he had not handled rights cases for about a decade.

Condes, a criminal defense lawyer for 26 years, said she considered Fickes’ ballot label “problematic” but hadn’t known much about his practice before the March primary election and couldn’t have afforded the $20,000plus it would have taken to mount a legal challenge. After she and Fickes ran first and second in the primary, she raised the issue with the county registrar but said she was told she had waited too long.

“How he presents himself — before he signed up for the election, it wasn’t as a civil rights attorney,” Condes said.

Fickes, in return, noted that Condes had described herself only as a trial attorney and not as a criminal defense lawyer.

Fickes, a gay man, is endorsed by the California Democratic Party and a number of local elected officials, including Assemblyman Rob Bonta, DAlameda. Condes, a lesbian who would also be the court’s first Latina judge, is backed by retiring Judge Carol Brosnahan and 20 of her court colleagues, along with labor unions, four county supervisors, farm labor leader Dolores Huerta and civil rights attorneys

Eva Paterson and Walter Riley.

A dispute over ballot labels may not matter much in most political campaigns, where candidates generally have wellestablished records on the issues and take positions in public debates. But rules of ethics largely prohibit judicial candidates from taking public stances on controversial issues, and their campaigns are generally conducted in obscurity.

“It’s a problem with having elected judges,” said attorney Michael Risher, who has handled civil rights cases and described himself as an opengovernment lawyer. “The electorate is not likely to be wellinformed about the particulars of their career, and it’s easy to manipulate.”

Natasha Minsker, a San Francisco attorney and criminal justice advocate who supports Condes, said the “average voter knows absolutely nothing about the judicial candidates. They frequently skip judicial candidates. If they do vote, they’re limited to what they read on the ballot.”

Minsker, like Loyola’s Levinson, said the solution, if there is one, depends on voters’ willingness to take a closer look.

“The good news is, people are going to be filling out their ballots at home and they have time to do the research,” Minsker said. “Google every one of these candidates for judge. See who’s supporting them. Even just reading the voter guide that has their candidate statements. Don’t do the vote based on their name and what it says on the ballot.”