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Wait, I have to vote for judges, too? A primer on NYC's judicial elections.
By
Michelle Bocanegra
Published Oct 31, 2024
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Mindaugas Dulinskas / Getty Images
By
Michelle Bocanegra
Published Oct 31, 2024
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New York voters have been bombarded with information on a multitude of crucial elections, including presidential, congressional and state legislative races. But the part of the ballot that often boasts the greatest number of candidates is also the most obscure: judges.
While the governor appoints certain high-level judges, like those on the New York Court of Appeals, judges in the Civil, Surrogate and Supreme Courts appear on voters’ ballots. (In New York, the Supreme Court is one of the lower courts in the system.)
How they get there varies greatly by seat and location. And voters often head into booths without having heard of their judicial candidates, who are in effect predetermined by county parties.
“The premise that electing judges creates more accountability — in some ways, it's false,” said Rachael Fauss, a senior policy adviser for the government reform group Reinvent Albany. ”These are extremely low-information elections for voters.”
Gothamist is here to demystify the strange world of judicial elections in New York, and tell you what to expect on your ballot in the five boroughs.
Which judges will I see on my ballot?
New York City voters will generally be voting for Civil and Supreme Court judges in this election, but who ends up on your ballot depends on where you live. You can look up a sample ballot with your address here.
How did they get there?
Like most candidates, the countywide Civil Court candidates and their district-level counterparts face voters in a primary — so if you voted in June, you should’ve seen your party’s nominees before. The winners head back to the electorate for the general election, but they often run on multiple party lines. For some judicial seats, you’ll see the same name on the Democratic, Republican and Conservative Party lines.
Critics reject the notion that this makes the process inherently more democratic, and note that many candidates refuse to run without the explicit support of party leadership at the county level.
“Because the party has such influence over the Supreme Court process … you wouldn't want to get on the party's bad side early on,” said Caitlin Kawaguchi, a judicial delegate and president of New Kings Democrats, a reform faction of the Brooklyn Democratic Party. “You would want to be in their favor, because you will need their support to get into the Supreme Court.”
A nomination the state Supreme Court requires a judicial convention. Judicial delegates — who are also chosen by voters — pick the spots. (You probably saw them in a past election, too.)
In practice, county political leadership has enormous influence over which names go before the judicial delegates. Critics have long complained about a lack of transparency around the very screening committees tasked with presenting a list of candidates to delegates.
“It's a very top-down process where basically the county party leadership ultimately is who is selecting the candidates for judge who will be on the ballot in November,” Fauss said, saying the process does not favor voters once the general election comes. “Because New York City's basically a one-party city in many districts, there's zero choice.”
Why haven’t I heard much about them?
In addition to being all but predetermined, judicial candidates don’t tend to make a splash with their policy views in the same way congressional candidates might. This is inherent to the work of a judge, who is supposed to assess cases based on their interpretation of the law rather than their personal beliefs.
“They can't talk about how they might rule on specific cases. They can't talk about their own policy beliefs or their policy beliefs as it connects to a party,” Kawaguchi said.
A slate of good governance associations, including Reinvent Albany and Common Cause New York, are pushing state legislation that would require decisions in criminal cases and related information to be public — which would be one helpful tool in evaluating judicial candidates, Fauss said. Only 6% of written decisions in New York criminal court are published, according to findings from her organization and Scrutinize, a group dedicated to bolstering transparency around judicial decision-making.
Why are some of these judicial candidates running on opposing party lines?
New York state practices fusion voting, which allows a candidate to add up all the votes they accumulated from each party line they ran on. This is more commonly seen in traditional elections in which a Democrat may also be running on the Working Families Party line, or a Republican on the Conservative Party line.
But blurred party allegiances — in which someone runs on both the Democratic and Republican lines — are most common among judicial candidates.
“Sometimes there are just political calculations that the parties make with regard to endorsing another party's candidate,” said election lawyer Jerry Goldfeder.
Has anyone ever tried to change this?
A challenge to New York’s judicial convention process went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, where a lower court decision that declared the system unconstitutional was overturned in 2008. In his concurring opinion with Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the ruling “should not be misread as endorsement of the electoral system under review.”
“As I recall my esteemed former colleague, Thurgood Marshall, remarking on numerous occasions: ‘The Constitution does not prohibit legislatures from enacting stupid laws,’” Stevens wrote.
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Michelle Bocanegra
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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