Hundreds of thousands of people have already cast ballots in Tuesday's midterm and statewide election, and in a lot of those communities the ballot can seem longer than a CVS receipt. Fighting through race after race can be a daunting task for even the most dedicated political junkie, and a lot of media outlets (including this one) have spent time covering the biggest and most significant races.
But too often, ballot fatigue sets in when someone gets to the "judicial retention" portion. Judges in Illinois don't "run" for those offices, but are appointed, and voters then have a chance to give them a vote of confidence at regular intervals with a straight "yes/no" question on whether they should be retained. So after making selections for the "marquee" matchups (governor, U.S. Senate, Congress and so forth), a voter is faced with a list of appeals, circuit and district judges, with almost no information except for their name, and the temptation is strong to either blindly vote to confirm them or skip it altogether.
Don't do that, said Mike Shapiro from the Chicago Bar Association.
"That's a government official that people can really come into contact with," he told me this week as we talked about the CBA's work evaluating judges up for retention in each election cycle. Shapiro made the point that a lot of people can encounter a judge in their lives, whether they or a family member are accused of a crime, need help with a divorce or family estate matter, or even fighting a parking ticket.
In addition, the state's passage of the bail reform law known as the Safe-T Act has increased the responsibility judges have to use proper discretion in deciding whether a criminal defendant should be kept in custody or should be released back into the community. "We want qualified judges," Shapiro said.
As a result, he and about 150 volunteer colleagues from the Bar spend months talking to other lawyers about their experiences, looking at how frequently a judge is overturned on appeal, and how they run their courtroom: "We look at a judge's integrity and his or her lack of bias, whether they are honest or whether they favor any group or type of litigant, things like that."
That information, sometimes including interviews with the judges, then gets translated into a rating showing whether the CBA believes the jurist in question is "Highly Qualified," "Qualified" or "Not Recommended." The CBA then posts those recommendations online, where voters can download them to or bring them up on their phones right in the voting booth to assist in making an informed decision. "We publish our ratings in English, Spanish and Polish," Shapiro added.
We'll put a link to the Chicago Bar Association's recommendations at the bottom of this essay. A number of other bar associations compile similar judicial recommendations, including affinity groups covering various ethnic, racial and identity communities; your friendly neighborhood search engine should help you find one that best fits your needs.
The legal system is only as good as the people who work in it, and a judicial election is a critical opportunity to make sure that the people who are often the ultimate arbiters of what happens in our lives are people of integrity and fairness. Decades of election laws have conspired to make casting a vote in this section of the ballot as tough as possible, and unqualified judges are counting on you to see that long list of candidates and tap out.
Don't let them get away with it.
Chicago Bar Association 2026 Judicial Voters Guide: https://www.chicagobar.org/CBA/CBA/JEC/Judicial_Voters_Guide.aspx
