As you may know, the Legislature recently enacted a law that limits contributions to judicial campaigns to $2,800 per donor per election cycle. Many have praised this as an important step toward judicial campaign finance reform.
Others have countered that large campaign contributors easily can skirt the new law by pouring unlimited amounts of money into political action committees (on both sides), which are not subject to campaign contribution limits. The head of one such partisan PAC recently commented that the new law "[u]nfortunately É will only increase the power of special interests," and that special-interest PACs can be expected "to have a message that will be more hostile and aggressive than [judicial] candidates are willing to say."1 (Please see story on page 1.)
How can judicial candidates running on modest campaign budgets hope to compete with candidates who have well-funded "hostile and aggressive" PACs campaigning for them? Perhaps more to the point, how can voters hope to be able to discern which judicial candidates are most qualified, if partisan PACs flood the state with mail, TV, radio and newspaper advertising, which (if experience in other states holds true here) could be quite negative and largely uninformative, if not downright misleading to the voters?2
A plan to help voters is under way. Earlier this year, Rep. Shay Schual-Berke, the sponsor of the new judicial campaign contribution limits bill, met with King County Superior Court judges and the leaders of several local and ethnic bar associations. She acknowledged that campaign contribution limits could cause a dilemma for judicial candidates if there continue to be drastic increases in PAC-financed campaign advertising.
She proposed that bar associations, civic organizations and the press should collaborate to create an on-line "e-forum" for judicial candidates that would allow the candidates to communicate their qualifications and their messages to voters inexpensively. The basic premise is that the more information about each judicial candidate that can be made available to the voters, the better.
Following Rep. Schual-Berke's suggestion, a prototype judicial election Web site for Supreme Court and Court of Appeals candidates is jointly being developed for this fall's appellate judicial elections by several organizations, including the Municipal League of King County, the League of Women Voters of Washington, the Washington State Bar Association, the Washington State Trial Lawyers Associations, the Washington State Defense Trial Lawyers Association, the American Judi-cature Society and the King County Bar Association.
The group is using as its model a similar judicial election Web site that has operated for several years in Chicago.3 The Web site address will be www.votingforjudges.org.
Preliminary plans call for the Web site to go "live" by August 1. The Web site's content is expected to include the following types of items for each of the candidates for the Washington Supreme Court and the three divisions of the Court of Appeals:
- Resume of each candidate
- Candidate's written statement
- Link to candidate's Web site
- Endorsements of the candidate
- Evaluations by bar associations and civic associations, as well as evaluations by partisan political organizations (including descriptions of the judicial qualities that the respective organizations look for in judicial candidates)
- Results of bar polls and other judicial evaluation information, if available
- Copies of newspaper articles and editorial endorsements
- Information regarding contributions to the candidate's campaign
- Information regarding any disciplinary matters and/or fair campaign violations involving the candidate
- Answers to "frequently asked questions" (for example, why it is important to vote for judges, a description of the duties of judges at the respective appellate levels, a summary of desirable judicial qualities, and general information about the judicial branch of government)
- Links to related Web sites, including the Web sites of the candidate, Web sites of any associations that have rated the candidate, other judicial election-oriented Web sites, and government Web sites such as the Public Disclosure Commission, the Administrative Office of the Courts, etc.
Perhaps the biggest challenge will be how to achieve maximum public exposure for the Web site. One strategy will be to use email trees with the help of as many nonprofit organizations as possible and to coordinate with print and broadcast media statewide to direct voters' attention to the Web site. Other strategies also are being considered.
All of us working on the project are enthusiastic about the Web site's considerable potential as a voter education tool and a public service. We share the hope that the Web site will:
- Promote open government principles in the judicial branch by allowing voters to see a brief but balanced and many-faceted perspective of each candidate's qualifications and experience.
- Provide an effective platform from which all judicial candidates can communicate their qualifications, backgrounds and messages to voters.
- Be more useful to voters (and less expensive) than traditional forms of campaign communications.
- Provide important information that the voters' guides published by the Administrative Office of the Court (and even by newspapers) currently do not publish.
- Augment and update (not replace) the written voters' guides with last-minute information that, in some cases, could be crucial to voters. n
John Ruhl serves as the KCBA president. He is a member in the Seattle office of Eisenhower & Carlson PLLC. His commercial trial practice includes employment, construction, transportation and banking matters. He can be reached at jruhl@eisenhowerlaw.com.
1 "Political Spending Cap May Backfire: Campaign Donor Law May Just Reroute Money," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 23, 2006.
2 Please see article on Page 1.
3 See voteforjudges.org
