There are some important names near the bottom of the primary ballot next week, after the ones Cook County voters have heard — over and over again — after months-long barrage of political ads, televised debates and blow-by-blow press coverage.
They are the candidates for one of the 400-plus judges of the nation’s second-largest court system.
If you pull a Democratic voter on Tuesday, well after you’ve ticked off your choice for governor and just before you pick your choice for township committeeman, you’ll be confronted by a list of 30 candidates for 10 county-wide judgeships, and then up to a half-dozen more in your judicial sub-circuit.
Republican voters have it fairly easy: no one from the GOP is running for any county-wide judgeship, and only three of the 15 sub-circuit have contested primaries.
“A circuit court judge is not an office that nearly anybody will ever have contact with,” said Albert Klumpp, who may be the only researcher trying to tackle the question of how voters choose judicial candidates.
“It gets lost in all the noise there are so many other offices and they’re not going to remember the name of a county judge when they go to the polling place.”
That is a lot of names, and the sheer number of candidates, and the fact that judicial candidates are barred from making the kind of public statements that are typical in other campaigns, make it hard for voters to tell them apart.
What little statistical analysis is available seems to reinforce the conventional wisdom about judge races: voters are overwhelmed by their options.
In a telling trend, just having your name listed first is a growing advantage, as if befuddled voters are simply just trying to get their time in the polling booth over with. Voters, for no apparent reason, seem to favor female candidates over men, and Irish names over other ethnic groups.
Philip Spiwak, a Schaumburg attorney, changed his name to Shannon O’Malley and switched parties to Democrat from Republican before running in the northwest suburban 13th Sub-Circuit, seemingly to take advantage of the biases.
But there is a wealth of information available, said Jack Leyhane, a Chicago attorney whose blog, “For What It’s Worth” is widely considered the most definitive source of judicial race coverage.
Leyhane, who twice made unsuccessful runs for judge in the 1990s, had been discouraged about how hard it was to get the word out about his candidacy. On his site, he has links to every judge candidate’s campaign home page, and links to any online profiles and ratings from local bar associations, lists of candidate slates and endorsements and fundraiser announcements.
Leyhane said he pulls in a healthy 2 million page views in the months ahead of a primary.
“I suppose I could get more readers with celebrity gossip,” Leyhane joked. “But for voters, you’re never going to get invited to George Clooney’s villa, but you might end up in traffic court one day with one of these judges.”