Colorado needs substantive evaluations of judges
As Coloradans cast their ballots in the 2016 elections, despite being bombarded with political ads and mailers, most voters have little to no information on up to a third of the people asking for their vote: the judges, our state’s third branch of government.
Voters won’t be getting any better information before receiving or casting their ballots – although experts agree that more information to voters is what’s needed.
According to a 9News report citing a 2014 state governmentrun survey: “Only one third of Colorado voters feel they are sufficiently informed to decide which judges should be retained. … Further, only one-quarter of Colorado voters feel that most of the electorate has enough information.”
Unfortunately, the official, government-sanctioned incumbent-protection “performance reviews” produced by the state’s Commissions on Judicial Performance (published and disseminated, at significant taxpayer expense, in the Blue Book) fail to provide much, if any, substance behind the published “recommendations” (almost uniformly in favor of “retaining” judicial incumbents in office).
The Blue Book “reviews” are thus little more than taxpayerfunded political ads for incumbents.
The aforementioned 9News report — which was headlined “Colorado judges win elections despite bad reviews — converted the official performance review survey results into letter grades for each of the 108 judges appearing on the 2016 ballot. Amazingly, just like Lake Woebegone, all of the judges were graded “above average.” Letter grades ranged from a high of “A-” to a low of “B-” with the vast majority receiving a “B+” grade.
When every judge appearing on the ballot is graded “above average” (even those recommended for non-retention), how can voters distinguish between the good, the bad, and the ugly?
The Commissions on Judicial Performance (groups of political appointees charged with evaluating and reporting on the job performance of judicial incumbents) routinely fail to actually evaluate judicial job performance or provide adequate information sufficient for voters to base a decision. Summarizing an incumbent’s resume and tabulating the results of surveys sent out to a select group of lawyers and other judges fails to answer the question posed to voters, “Do they deserve another term — and why?”
As a Denver Post guest commentary by a former judicial performance commissioner noted:
“There has been a failure of real performance evaluation and a lack of analytical content in the write-ups for the voters ... Too often in the past, narratives have amounted to complimentary resumes instead of job performance evaluations.”
In any event, why do we have political appointees (commissioners are appointed by various elected officials and the chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court — the latter certainly seeming to have a conflict of interest) telling Coloradans how to vote?
For a fourth straight election cycle, Clear The Bench Colorado researched, reviewed and evaluated the actual job performance of the appellate court (statewide) judges appearing on the 2016 ballot (one Supreme Court justice, 10 Court of Appeals judges), collected inputs on district and county judges from around the state, and published a substantive analysis of judicial performance in an easyto-read scorecard format.
Shouldn’t Colorado voters have more, rather than less, information available before casting their vote?