Assessing Cook County Judicial Candidates – A Brief History

Cook County Courthouse, Daley Center

We lived in DuPage County in Illinois for twenty years. I was relatively active in politics during that time, I served as an election reconciliation judge in the county for years. In our time there, I don’t recall having especially noticed or much cared about county judicial elections.

We moved to Cook County in 2003. When elections rolled around, I was rather surprised about the number of judges on ballots, both for first-time election and for retention. In discussion with a few people, I became concerned with the likelihood that most voters in the county were voting blind. They had no idea about any of the candidates, did not understand the rules of candidacy, and, as many people told me, voted “yes” for all candidates or reflexively voted “no” in the spirit of “throw all the bums out!”

While humor of a bleak sort resides in such “no” votes, blanket “yes” votes were just as bad, at least as I saw it. My discussions with people who knew something about the county court system, never mind about the state Supreme Court, brought realization that these judges, especially the circuit court judges, are of great importance to each of us. In many instances a judge is the most likely county official the average citizen will ever encounter. That encounter could change a life. If the judge’s temperament or judicial behavior is questionable, the persons before her or him could quite literally be in a sort of jeopardy that would not prevail in front of another, better judge. So my sense grew that it’s incumbent (you should pardon the expression) upon each of us to pay much closer attention to who and what we’re voting for (not a bad rule in any case).

I began to investigate how to do two things: evaluate judge candidates and inform people about those evaluations. My research took me eventually to the work of the Alliance of Bar Associations. They send survey questionnaires to each judge candidate. Each member associations makes its own evaluations based both on replies to the questionnaires and on the sense of how a judge has observed the concerns and expectations of the association.

I first found the Association’s judicial screening table in 2010. The Alliance back then had 10 member associations, many of them specific to ethnic representation: Asian American Bar Association, Black Women Lawyers’ Association of Greater Chicago, Lesbian and Gay Bar Association of Chicago, for example. Among the other members were the Chicago Council of Lawyers, Cook County Bar Association and Illinois State Bar Association. Today the Alliance has 13 member bar associations, including most of the originals. The one outlier has always been the Chicago Bar Association. It does its own evaluations.

The Alliance’s system of evaluation then and now rates judges running for election, whether contested or not, with simple codes: HQ – Highly Qualified; WQ – Well Qualified; Q – Qualified; NQ – Not Qualified; HR –
Highly Recommended; R – Recommended; NR – Not Recommended; Not Evaluated Through No Fault of the Candidate. Judges running for retention have three possible ratings: Yes, No, Not Evaluated Through No Fault of the Candidate. Their tables, by the way, are available from numerous sources, including Vote for Judges (see below)

In 2010 I decided to share the Alliance table with as many people as I could. I really wanted to begin the process of ending blind (or non-) voting for judges in the county. Over the years since, my list of recipients for the evaluations grew substantially. A few years back I began my occasional blog, now named “Art Can Save Us and Life’s Ideas” (http://www.edmcdevitt.org, which you’re now looking at). In each election cycle I published my missive about judicial elections there and linked to it on Facebook and Twitter.

In the beginning, penetrating the Alliance’s evaluations to see what went into them was a significant chore. I did it to a certain extent. Sometimes I had outside information on a candidate that sent me to other possible sources. Also, as a frequent attendee at Democratic Party of Oak Park monthly meetings, I got to meet judicial candidates. At times I was a bit of a pain in the butt with candidates: I asked them pointed questions, especially if they were first-time judge candidates.

Anyway, in the early years of my work on this issue, I was not aware of anyone else, outside the Alliance of Bar Associations itself, that was showing public interest in this rather arcane pocket of Illinois politics. I was certainly aware that my audience for the evaluations was very thankful, since my contacts had previously been among the vast majority of voters who were clueless about why and how to vote for such candidates.

Eventually some new players appeared on the scene.

The first of these was Vote for Judges, a website that had the same purpose I had. It used the same source as I did: the Alliance table. Their site says that Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice began their efforts “more than a decade ago in an effort to educate voters about judicial elections in Cook County. Today, the website is sponsored by the Committee to Elect Qualified Judges, a political action committee dedicated to informed judicial voting.” While they might have been around “over a decade ago,” they were not easily found, not even on the site of the Alliance itself. In the past 3 election cycles or so, they’ve become quite a bit more visible.

In 2015 Injustice Watch, which describes itself as a “non-profit newsroom,” was created. It initially did not provide information on voting for judges. It began its own evaluations of judges very recently. While they do publish the Alliance’s evaluation table, they send out their own questionnaires. As a journalism organization, they also do independent investigations of candidates. In 2024 their compendium of evaluations expanded significantly and proved to be extensive, even in some ways exhausting – which is not a critique. The information they provided on certain candidates was unique to them and in one instance caused the Chicago Bar Association to totally change their support of a candidate. Their reporting is now a most important source.

In the 2024 general election, for a number of reasons the evaluations I depend upon and that drive what Vote for Judges provides was quite late in arriving. Early voting had already begun in several Cook County locations, particularly in Chicago. I was unable to get information out to my audience until a lot of people had already voted. The delay was due, at least partly, to the very large number of candidates, especially for retention.

In one sense it’s a bit surprising to no longer be alone in publicizing how to vote for judges in our county. The appearance of Vote for Judges was, for me, a most fortunate occurrence because it helped a lot in making a larger public aware. The sudden appearance of Injustice Watch’s extensive and detailed analyses was a real shock to the system for me, though not because I was feeling competition. I was both amazed and pleased that the fourth estate was finally paying close attention. I would gladly have made a bigger deal of their work had it not appeared so late in the cycle. It’s true that their ethos is, in certain ways, a sort of crusade to publicize the plight of the unnoticed and those poorly treated by the justice system. Be that as it may, the sheer volume and quality of their work is a terrific new contribution.

Just as interesting to me is that some mainstream publications, such as the Chicago Tribune, seem to be paying closer attention to judicial elections. In the past one might have encountered an article about a judge with particularly glaring issues, but that was about it. Now we get much more detailed information from such sources, never mind the excellent material from such services as Chicago Public Square.

Will I continue informing people in each judicial election cycle? Absolutely. Until Vote for Judges and Injustice Watch – never mind the Alliance of Bar Associations – are universally known, I’ll still inform my audience. I’ve spoken to many of them. They were, for the most part, unaware of those two sources. So my work still counts for something. When I perceive it’s redundant, I’ll think about letting it go. But it’s not redundant yet, to sort of paraphrase a character in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Until the plague cart comes by and they throw me in, I’ll keep on going.

Edmund J. McDevitt
© November 2024