KCBA is participating in a coalition of organizations and interested individuals with concern about the current process for selecting judges in Washington State. Each organization will consider and act upon proposed initiatives as recommended by representatives through meetings held approximately monthly.
Some of the expressed concerns that gave rise to this coalition effort are: the increasingly partisan nature of judicial campaigns; the escalating costs of funding a judicial election campaign; the lack of judicial campaign financing limits; the growing amounts of special interest money being injected into judicial campaigns; the lack of sufficient standards for eligibility for judicial office; the relative shortage of useful information available to voters regarding judicial candidates and the difficulties of ferreting out such information; and the skewing of voting results by irrelevant factors such as ballot placement and commonness of names of judicial candidates.
The Washington Judicial Selection Coalition is not the only group considering how best to select state judges. What follows are web sites and articles that provide additional information on this topic from within Washington and around the nation. Where materials are available electronically, the citation contains a hyperlink.
