The maneuver paid off last week. The GOP flipped three U.S. House seats, a windfall in light of that chamber’s tiny overall margin.

This sequence of events, besides illustrating the potential ramifications of state judicial elections, also captures the predicament that progressive lawyers find themselves in after Donald Trump’s victory, which cements conservatives’ stronghold on federal courts for the foreseeable future. More than before, progressives working to protect people’s rights will need state supreme courts to be hospitable to lawsuits that are increasingly dead on arrival at the federal level. They’ll have a shrinking range of options in states where conservatives have locked in a right-wing court.

The outcome of dozens of supreme court races last week set the stage for how critical legal battles from abortion rights to gerrymandering could play out in state courts across the country. And the results were mixed, with plenty for both liberals and conservatives to celebrate.

On one side, Democrats expanded their majority on Michigan’s supreme court. In Kentucky, a candidate who ran with the backing of Democrats flipped a seat held by a retiring conservative justice. In Mississippi, a conservative justice endorsed by the state GOP suffered a shock defeat. Montanans maintained a liberal lean on their court, likely keeping it a thorn on the side of GOP leaders. And Governor Tim Walz’s appointees prevailed in Minnesota.

Republicans, meanwhile, expanded their majority on the supreme court in Ohio, leaving Democrats with just one seat, and they may do the same in North Carolina, pending final results. Conservative justices in Arizona survived a campaign to oust them over their decision to revive a long-buried abortion ban. Texas’ high courts jumped further to the right even if their partisan composition—all GOP judges—didn’t change. The elections are also likely to embolden conservatives in Arkansas and Oklahoma. 

Bolts walks you through each supreme court race that took place last week, state by state:

Alabama

Justice Sarah Stewart, a Republican, easily prevailed over her Democratic opponent to become Alabama’s chief justice. Her win keeps the state supreme court all-GOP, and largely unchanged from the court that ruled in February that frozen embryos are children, endangering IVF treatments; Stewart joined the majority in that decision. 

Chris McCool, a Republican appeals court judge, won the race to replace Stewart as an associate justice. (He faced no opponent.) McCool, like the rest of Alabama’s judicial candidates, dodged questions about the court’s IVF ruling during the campaign. 

Alaska

Voters retained Justices Dario Borghesan and Jennifer Henderson, a result well in line with the state’s political history: No Alaska justice has lost a retention race since 1962. There have been some conservative efforts to reshape the court over dissatisfaction with its rulings on abortion, but neither Borghesan or Henderson has ruled on the issue since joining the court.

Arizona

Progressives mounted an unusually vigorous effort to oust Clint Bolick and Kathryn King, two conservative justices who voted to revive a near-total abortion ban this spring. But no Arizona justice has ever lost one of these up-or-down retention elections, and voters kept up that record this fall: Bolick and King secured new terms with 58 and 59 percent of the vote, respectively. 

Meanwhile, Republicans failed in their effort to end judicial elections in the state. Prop 137 would have handed supreme court justices a permanent appointment until they hit the mandatory retirement age, effectively freezing the conservative court in place, but voters rejected it by an overwhelming majority of 77 to 23 percent.

Arkansas

When the Arkansas Supreme Court knocked an abortion rights measure off the ballot in August on a 4-3 vote, Justice Rhonda Wood wrote the majority opinion, while Justice Karen Baker dissented. “Why are the respondents and the majority determined to keep this particular vote from the people?” said Baker, a justice with a moderate reputation.

Three months later, on Election Day, Baker beat Wood in the race for chief justice. This promotion will give her more influence over the Arkansas judiciary since the chief justice supervises state courts and names court administrators. 

And yet it’s conservatives who stand to gain ground on the court after this election, despite moderate judges winning both seats in contention. This is due to the fact that several justices played an odd game of musical chairs this year, running for seats other than their own. Besides Baker and Wood, Justice Courtney Hudson successfully ran to change seats earlier this year to circumvent the state’s mandatory retirement rules by a few extra years. 

Baker and Hudson’s victories have now created two vacancies that GOP Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a staunch conservative, will get to fill. This is expected to increase the conservative bloc on this seven-member court from four to five justices. (Importantly, the state constitution bars an appointed justice from seeking a full term, so both of these seats will be on the ballot without an incumbent in 2026.)

Colorado

The Colorado Supreme Court’s short-lived decision to bar Trump from the ballot grabbed international headlines last year. But it didn’t make waves at the ballot box this fall. Faced with a minor conservative effort to target her, Justice Monica Márquez, who sided with the majority in that decision, prevailed with 64 percent of the vote in an up-or-down retention vote. 

Two justices who dissented in that ruling prevailed with similar numbers: 67 percent for Maria Berkenkotter and 63 percent for Brian Boatright. And while there is some geographic variation in the results, it’s not very pronounced; Márquez did better in blue Denver than in El Paso and Weld counties, large conservative bastions, but she received a majority in the latter as well. 

Florida

No justice has ever lost a retention election in Florida, and no history was made in 2024. More than 62 percent of Floridians voted to keep Justices Renetha Francis and Meredith Sasso in an up-or-down vote. Francis and Sasso were appointed to the court by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis over the last two years, and they’ve quickly made their mark as conservatives even by the standards of this right-wing court. 

Idaho

Chief Justice Richard Bevan, a former Republican prosecutor who was appointed to the court by Governor Butch Otter, was unopposed as he ran for a new term. Anticipating his reelection, his colleagues this fall chose to keep him as their chief for an additional six years.  

Illinois

Democrats will retain a 5-to-2 majority on the Illinois Supreme Court after an uneventful general election.

Democratic Justice Joy Cunningham ran unopposed in the first district, which encompasses Cook County; Republican Justice Lisa Holder White ran unopposed in the fourth district, located in western Illinois.

Indiana

The three justices who faced up-or-down retention votes easily passed the test, each with roughly 70 percent of the vote.

Iowa

Justice David May was facing voters for the first time since his 2022 appointment by Republican Governor Kim Reynolds. This summer, he joined a narrow majority of the court to lift an injunction against the state’s abortion ban, but there was no organized effort to defeat him this fall. He prevailed 63 to 37 percent in an up-or-down retention election.

Kentucky

Liberals gained ground on the Kentucky supreme court. Pamela Goodwine, a state judge who ran with Democratic support, easily won a supreme court race over an opponent aligned with Republicans. She will replace a conservative justice who is retiring. 

With conservatives already frustrated that this court was too moderate, last week’s result comes on the heels of another defeat in the 2022 midterms, when an anti-abortion lawmaker failed in his effort to oust a Democratic-appointed justice. 

Goodwine will be the first Black woman on the Kentucky supreme court.  

“As we look to our state courts to protect certain civil liberties because our federal courts are becoming far less hospitable, we’re always happy to see this court at least remain an option for litigation, and are certainly pleased to see the Kentucky Supreme Court become more representative of the population it serves,” said Corey Shapiro, legal director at the ACLU of Kentucky. Shapiro also cautioned that this court tends to be less starkly polarized than those in some other states, making it tricky to predict how justices will come down on any one case.

Louisiana

The state this year drew a new map for its judicial districts, for the first time since 1997. The long-overdue redistricting created a second majority-Black district as many justices had demanded. Republican Justice Scott Crichton retired from the court, and he will be replaced by John Guidry, a Black Democrat who ran unopposed for this new district.

Maryland

Voters easily retained three justices in up-or-down retention votes. This fits Maryland voters’ usual approach to judicial elections: All of the court’s current members have won retention races with at least 75 percent of the vote.

Michigan

Democrats expanded their majority on this supreme court last week. They swept both seats on the ballot, and are now ahead 5 to 2. 

Justice Kyra Harris Bolden, who was appointed to the bench by Governor Gretchen Whitmer last year, won a full term. She will be joined by Kimberly Ann Thomas, a law professor who currently runs the Juvenile Justice Clinic at the University of Michigan and who was running for the seat held by a retiring Republican justice. They each won by more than 20 percentage points over GOP opponents.

In recent years, the court has issued party-line decisions on major cases that have upheld direct democracy and curtailed the harsh sentencing of minors, and last week’s results are likely to strengthen the court as a pathway for civil rights litigants. 

Minnesota

Two justices appointed by Democratic Governor Tim Walz easily prevailed against more conservative challengers. Justice Karl Procaccini, who joined the court last year after working as Walz’s general counsel, beat Matthew Hanson, a local attorney, and Chief Justice Natalie Hudson beat Stephen Emery, a candidate who in the past has amplified false claims about voter fraud. 

As a result, all members of this court remain selected by Democratic governors.

Mississippi

Justice Dawn Beam ran for reelection with the full backing of the state Republican Party, which usually goes a long way in this red state, but she suffered a shock defeat at the hands of David Sullivan, a lawyer who has worked as a defense attorney and public defender and was labeled “a stealth candidate” by The Sun Herald. 

Beam has one of the most consistently conservative records on the Mississippi supreme court, while Sullivan, the son of a former justice, gave few indications of his judicial philosophy during the campaign and did not respond to a request for comment from Bolts. Sullivan faulted Beam during the campaign for receiving the GOP’s endorsement in this nonpartisan race. 

Whether the court’s overall balance of power shifts isn’t yet settled, however. Jim Kitchens, one of the more moderate justices on the court, will face a runoff on Nov. 26 against Jenifer Branning, a self-described “constitutional conservative” running with the support of the GOP. 

Missouri

Voters adopted a constitutional amendment codifying a right to abortion access, overturning the state’s abortion ban. But the measure was almost knocked off the ballot just two months ago when the state supreme court rejected a challenge to the amendment by only a narrow 4-3 vote. 

Two of the justices who dissented in that decision and would have voided the abortion rights measure easily secured new terms on this supreme court last week: Justices Kelly Broniec and Ginger Gooch received 62 and 63 percent of the vote, respectively, in up-or-down retention elections. Broniec and Gooch also voted this fall to not intervene in the case of Marcellus Williams, who was executed by the state despite the paucity of evidence against him. 

Montana

The Montana supreme court has been a thorn on the side of the Republican politicians who are running the rest of the state government. The justices have struck down a series of GOP laws in recent years, including restrictions on abortion, trans rights, and voter registration. “It’s our last backstop,” Keaton Sunchild, director of civic engagement at the nonprofit Western Native Voice, told Bolts this summer about the sort of civil rights litigation his organization supports. 

Conservatives were hoping to make up a lot of ground this fall by winning both open seats on the ballot—these races are technically nonpartisan, but candidates often draw support from partisan officials and advocacy organizations—but they only secured one. Cory Swanson, who was backed by conservative interests, won the election for chief justice. But Katherine Bidegaray, who was endorsed by liberal interests, will join the court as an associate justice. She won by 8 percentage points in tough conditions, as the GOP swept all statewide partisan offices.

As a result, the court is likely to retain its liberal lean. The sitting justices have sometimes formed idiosyncratic alliances, making it difficult to neatly classify them into ideological camps. But Bidegaray’s victory means that the court would likely rule the same way if it had to reassess its recent election law or trans rights decisions, which came down in 5 to 2 rulings. 

“We are glad that for now the Supreme Court looks like it will protect freedoms enshrined in the Montana constitution,” Sunchild told Bolts after the results were announced.

Nebraska

Justice Stephanie Stacy faced an uneventful campaign as she ran in an up-or-down retention election. 76 percent of voters chose to keep her on the bench. 

New Mexico

Democratic Justice Briana Zamora easily prevailed in her first up-or-down retention election, with 71 percent of the vote. All five members of the state supreme court are Democrats. 

Nevada

Nevada holds regular judicial elections where candidates can challenge incumbents. But no one was running against Justices Elissa Cadish, Patricia Lee, and Lidia Stiglich this year.

North Carolina

A Democratic justice lost her reelection bid in North Carolina by just 401 votes four years ago, which paved the way for the GOP to take over the court two years later. Since then, Republican justices have promptly reversed decisions on gerrymandering, felony disenfranchisement, and voter ID, and changed gears in racial discrimination cases.

Democrats may be losing even more ground on the court this year. As of publication, Democratic Justice Allison Riggs trails Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin by a tight margin of roughly 7,700 votes (that’s 0.14 percentage points). The race remains unresolved pending the final count of mail and provisional ballots. 

Should Griffin retain his lead, the GOP would expand its majority on the court to a commanding 6 to 1. Griffin explicitly ran on preserving the recent rulings that have given a political edge to the GOP, including the decision that greenlit the state’s new congressional map. He also celebrated the court blessing new voter ID requirements, telling voters at a campaign event this spring, “How cool was it to show your ID when you go vote this year? It was pretty awesome, right?” 

Ohio

Republicans swept all three supreme court seats on Ohio’s ballot, boosted by the state’s conservative lean. As a result, they will significantly increase their control over the court, from 4-3 to 6-1. 

Two Democratic justices, Melody Stewart and Michael Donnelly, were defeated by large margins by Joe Deters, a Republican who is already on the court, and Megan Shanahan, a local judge. Republican Dan Hawkins, another local judge, won the third, open race.

These results add to the conservative takeover of Ohio’s supreme court two years ago, when Maureen O’Connor, a moderate Republican who had joined Democrats to strike down GOP gerrymanders, retired and was replaced by a more conservative Republican. The new bloc of GOP justices has been more united on major cases; most recently, they blessed a controversial maneuver by Republican officials to undermine redistricting reform.

Oregon

The court will retain its left-leaning majority: Five of its seven members, all justices appointed to the bench by Democratic governors, won new terms this fall after running unopposed.

Oklahoma

Conservatives cheered a startling victory in Oklahoma: Yvonne Kauger became the first justice in the state’s history to be ousted after losing an up-or-down retention vote. Kauger, who has been on this court since 1984, was dragged down by heavy spending from groups looking to push the bench to the right and she ultimately lost by less than one percent.

Two other justices, James Edmonson and Norma Gurich, survived the onslaught by very narrow margins. They, like Kauger, were appointed to the court by Democratic governors, and conservatives made the case that they were too liberal for the state, pointing for instance to a 5–to-4 ruling last year that affirmed a narrow right for a woman to access abortion when necessary to save her life. (Edmonson, Gurich, and Kauger were all in the majority of that decision.)

The power to appoint Kauger’s replacement now falls to Republican Governor Kevin Stitt, though his choice is restricted to a short list supplied by a nominating commission. The supreme court in recent years has repeatedly struck down priorities of Stitt’s, for instance his plan to privatize Medicaid, and the governor helped fund the campaign to oust the justices this fall.

South Dakota

Justice Scott Myren easily survived his first up-or-down retention election, with 80 percent of voters choosing to keep him. An appointee of Republican Governor Kristi Noem, Myren was the only justice to dissent from a ruling that invalidated a 2020 ballot measure legalizing marijuana, and described initiatives as “this bold experiment in citizen-led direct democracy.”

Tennessee

Dwight Tarwater was nominated to the supreme court last year by Republican Governor Bill Lee, cementing the court’s rightward shift, and he easily prevailed in his first up-or-down retention election, with roughly 72 percent of voters choosing to keep him on the bench.

Texas

Republican nominees continued their decades-old streak of winning statewide elections in Texas, sweeping all six elections for seats on the state’s two high courts. Justices Jane Bland, John Devine, and Jimmy Blacklock all secured new terms on the Texas supreme court, which recently upheld the state’s near-total abortion ban. 

For the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the court that has the ultimate jurisdiction on criminal cases, three archconservative Republicans will join the court. They each ousted a GOP incumbent in the March primary, part of an effort by Attorney General Ken Paxton to seek revenge against the judges who limited his power to prosecute election crimes. “MAKE JUSTICE GREAT AGAIN!” Gina Parker, one of the winning judges who ran by touting Paxton and Trump’s support, posted on Facebook after her victory.

Utah

An overwhelming majority of Utahns voted to retain Chief Justice Matthew Durrant. This summer, Durrant and his colleagues angered Republican lawmakers when they issued a unanimous ruling curtailing the legislature’s ability to override citizen ballot initiatives. Lawmakers tried to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot to override that decision, but the court then voided that amendment, ruling that it used deceptive language.

Washington

Democrats dominated state elections in this blue state, sweeping all partisan statewide offices by double-digits. But the open race for state supreme court turned out to be exceedingly close, with just 0.8 percent separating candidates Sal Mungia and Dave Larson as of publication. This is a nonpartisan race, but Democratic leaders largely endorsed Mungia, while Larson, a local judge, said the state’s court system is too progressive.

Regardless, the court will retain a left-leaning majority. Two progressive justices, Steven González and Sheryl Gordon McCloud, secured new terms without facing any opponent.

West Virginia

Charles Trump, a Republican state senator who voted in favor of the state’s near-total ban on abortion in 2022, won a seat on the court this year without facing any opponent. He will join Justice Haley Bunn, who ran for reelection unopposed.

Wyoming

Justices John Flenn and Kate Fox, each originally selected for the court by a Republican governor, easily secured new terms.

The post How Supreme Court Elections Set the Stage for Coming Battles, from Voting to Abortion appeared first on Bolts.

But we also wanted to hear from you. For “Ask Bolts,” our ongoing series in which we tackle reader questions, we asked you what you wanted to know about these upcoming elections. 

As always, you came through with many thoughtful questions. Today I tackle six of them—a fun opportunity to introduce you to our team’s elections reporting and research in a new way.

Navigate to the question that most interests you here, or scroll down to explore them all at your leisure:

What are the interesting referenda in November?
Jump to our answer.

What is a state auditor, and why should I care?
Jump to our answer.

What’s the best way to find out about nonpartisan judges? So many people tell me they have no idea and leave the ballot blank.
Jump to our answer.

I have a lot of friends who say, “I live in D.C., it’s not like my vote matters that much.” What downballot races can I advocate for?
Jump to our answer.

What’s the most unusual office that’s having elections?
Jump to our answer.

Where can people get involved as poll monitors? I can travel.
Jump to our answer.

Stay tuned for more before election day. And if you have a question, it’s not too late to share it!

What are the interesting referenda in November? — @tomwwhittington, on BlueSky

Lucky for you, our cheat sheet lists dozens of state and local ballot measures, ranging from abortion rights and labor to criminal justice and election rules. You may have heard of the biggest ones: Arizona and Florida could reverse abortion restrictions. Ohio may switch to independent redistricting, which would undo GOP gerrymanders by 2026. Alaska could repeal ranked-choice voting, two years after Sarah Palin blamed it for her loss.

But many important measures remain under the radar. Take Arizona’s Prop 134: The GOP hopes it’ll squash future citizen-led initiatives, as their party is frustrated that progressives have used this to sponsor reforms like an increase to the minimum wage. This is happening beyond Arizona, too. If Measure 2 passes, North Dakota would become the only state where a measure has to pass on two separate election days within the same year to become law.

Conservatives are pushing many other big changes. North Dakota could also become the first state to eliminate property taxes if it passes Measure 4, a proposal put forth by a right-wing organization that calls property taxes “immoral.” A Kentucky measure could greenlight public funding of private schools. In Washington, a pair of referendums could undo a capital gains tax and environmental regulations. An initiative in Colorado may make it harder for people with long prison sentences to be released.

Some of the most interesting progressive efforts are happening at the municipal level. Memphis is defying Tennessee’s GOP lawmakers with a gun control measure. Some cities are looking to create new funds to boost affordable housing; many others, like Columbus and Nashville, are asking voters to hike local taxes to pour more money into public transit. I’m also watching a pair of local measures in California that would expand the franchise: Albany may lower the voting age to 16, and Santa Ana may allow noncitizens to participate in local elections. At the state level, will Nebraskans mandate paid sick leave from employers?

My list could go on, so let me end with: California and Nevada are voting on removing language from their state constitutions that allow “involuntary servitude” for incarcerated people. This would have the major ramifications in restricting forced prison labor, we reported recently. 

What is a state auditor, and why should I care? — from @rutiregan, on BlueSky

Auditors, or controllers as they’re known in some places, are meant to check that government agencies are working properly—that they’re implementing programs as they should, that they’re allocating funds where they should. So it can make a difference whether an auditor believes in the basic mission of the public services they’re supposed to be assessing. 

But auditors also have the discretion to set the priorities of their office, based on which agencies and programs they believe are most in need of supervision. And their political outlook matters here. In 2022, Bolts covered the unusual candidacy of Kenneth Mejia, who won the office of Los Angeles controller on a vow to audit the police department after a campaign in which he raised questions about the scope of the LAPD’s $3 billion budget. He has since released a critical review of their large helicopter program. And while Mejia was running for a municipal office, state-level auditors can similarly direct their office’s resources where they think there’s a need. 

This year, two states are holding competitive auditor races (North Carolina and Pennsylvania), and a common thread stands out in each: The GOP candidates are saying that state elections systems need auditing, amid conservatives’ broader rhetoric questioning election integrity. 

Pennsylvania Auditor Timothy DeFoor, a Republican running for reelection, launched a review in mid-September of the state’s program to automatically register eligible voters when they interact with the Department of Motor Vehicles. Republicans have pushed a false narrative this fall that noncitizens are participating in U.S. elections, with Pennsylvania at the center of their efforts given its role in the presidential race. DeFoor’s Democratic challenger, state Representative Malcolm Kenyatta, accused DeFoor of “paving the way for Trump’s Big Lie 2.0” and “provid[ing] cover for dangerous conspiracies and election denialism.” DeFoor has said he was not motivated by partisan purposes in launching this review.

In North Carolina, the GOP’s auditor nominee Dave Boliek wants to create a division in charge of investigating voter rolls and voting equipment. “There’s a tremendous amount of distrust in the election process,” he said in the GOP primary. Boliek faces Democratic Auditor Jessica Holmes, who was appointed to the office last year after a prior auditor resigned in scandal. 

What’s the best way to find out about non-partisan judges? So many people tell me they have no idea and leave the ballot blank. — @IndyDeVoe, on Twitter | How can I find out the party affiliation of judges running for office? — Eliz, in California

Far and away, some version of this question is what we heard from you the most—where can I possibly learn more about judicial elections? 

Unfortunately, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s very difficult to find the information you’d want. Depending on where you live, you may see a dozen judicial races on your ballot at once, and in many states, these races are nonpartisan. You’re likely to find little about the candidates. Even if you come across their website or an interview with the press, which is by no means a given, they’re probably just promising to be fair and follow the rule of law. 

Some local publications prepare extensive voter guides for all local judges, looking into their backgrounds and records: I’m thinking for instance of Injustice Watch in Chicago, which just published its judicial guide this week. At Bolts, we cover some local judgeships, but our comprehensive coverage is reserved for state supreme court races. To explain the stakes, we identify recent cases, review who is backing the candidates, and ask how a change in membership would shift a court. 

So the first thing I’d recommend is to see if you have a newsroom in your backyard with such a guide. But as you can see from these examples, these projects devour a lot of time and resources. 

If you don’t find that, there may be local legal organizations that have issued assessments. But ideally there’d be several such reports to compare critically; such organizations may conceal biases of their own, and ignore the differences between candidates’ ideological commitments. 

Many judges insist they’re apolitical, even when their rulings reveal a consistent outlook. But you may find hints. For instance, who appointed them to the bench? But be careful to also learn if that official really has control over who they chose. In Florida, for instance, Governor Ron DeSantis has pushed the courts to the right with his nominations; his choice is technically constrained by the state’s nominating commission, but that body is now staunchly conservative. 

Even in an ostensibly nonpartisan race, judicial candidates often receive public endorsements from parties or financial support from partisan PACs. They may be part of groups like the progressive American Constitution Society or the conservative Federalist Society. And they may have a trail of statements that clarify their beliefs. For instance, in looking at the social media account of one of the candidates for Minnesota’s supreme court, I came across numerous comments supportive of Donald Trump and conservative legal positions.

And sometimes, you’ll find candidates who are open about their views while campaigning. They may be saying that they hope to reduce mass incarceration or combat criminal justice reform, that they support or oppose abortion rights, or that they’d combat gerrymandering. Judicial races always have consequences; these are just the cases where it’s easiest to see how.

I live in Washington, D.C., and I have a lot of friends who say something along the lines of, “Well, I live in D.C., so it’s not like my vote matters that much.” What downballot races can I advocate for? — Paige, in Washington, D.C.

I won’t lie to you: The D.C. ballot isn’t the most eventful this November. Most D.C. elections are settled in Democratic primaries, since Democrats are so dominant. Plus, the contests for mayor and attorney general will only be on the ballot in two years. And while some residents tried to force recall votes against Charles Allen and Brianne Nadeau, two progressive city councilors who backed criminal justice reforms, they failed to gather enough signatures.

In fact, the most interesting aspect of D.C.’s elections this year may be who gets to vote in them: The city has begun implementing a new reform that allows noncitizens to vote in local elections. 

Still, there is one big-ticket item on November’s ballot: Initiative 83. 

This measure would transform the way D.C. runs its local elections. If it passes, the city would still hold primaries to decide each party’s nominee, and then a general election. But two things would change: Independents would be allowed to vote in a party’s primaries. And primaries and general elections would be decided through ranked-choice voting. Proponents say this would ramp up competition and enable more people to participate in the typically-decisive primaries. The Democratic establishment is largely fighting it, arguing that the system is too complicated and that parties should have the right to restrict their primary electorate. 

But when it comes to national politics, the voices of D.C. residents continue to be devalued: They have no representation in Congress, a situation with a long and racist history. Democrats in the U.S. House passed a bill in 2021 that granted statehood to D.C., but the bill faltered in the Senate. 

“D.C.’s lack of congressional representation in the year 2024 is unconscionable,” Ankit Jain told me this week. Jain, a voting rights attorney, is running this year to be one of the district’s two shadow senators. These are officials elected by residents as though they are a senator; they do not get a seat in the chamber, but they take an active part in the city’s advocacy for more representation. (Jain, a Democrat, is heavily favored against GOP nominee Nelson Rimensnyder.)

“We are American citizens who simply want the same right as every other American citizen—the right to vote and to influence our own government,” Jain said, denouncing “the injustice and racism of denying the right to vote to 700,000 tax-paying American citizens, a majority of whom are people of color and a plurality of whom are Black.” He added, “I cannot help but think that if our population was whiter that getting statehood would be much easier.”

What’s the most unusual office that’s having elections? — Paul, from New York

There’s a bevy of riches when it comes to elections that people don’t think of. Did you know Florida elects public defenders, or that, in Montana, contests for a local government study commission have become a key test for housing affordability?

For this question, I’ll pick a little-known office: Vermont’s high bailiffs. Each of Vermont’s 14 counties elects this obscure position with limited formal powers—technically, their role is to arrest the sheriff, and to act as sheriff when the sheriff is incapacitated. But in 2020, two progressives ran, and won, races for high bailiff in Addison and Windsor counties on the idea that they could leverage whatever visibility the office has to help reduce incarceration.

Dave Silberman, a drug decriminalization advocate who became Addison County high bailiff, told me at the time that people should get creative in using whatever levers of power exist in their areas to make a difference. “It’s up to me as an activist, as a person who’s looking to change the system, to use the tools at our disposal to make our society better,” he said. 

I recently caught up with Silberman to talk about his first four years in the office. Silberman, who actually briefly served as acting sheriff in 2022 when the sitting sheriff was arrested over sexual assault charges, said he is wielding his bully pulpit to promote the idea that Vermont should altogether eliminate sheriffs, and has repeatedly pressed that case at the state legislature. “What we’re seeing across the country, but also here in Vermont, is that the entire construct of elected sheriffs is dangerously prone to corruption and serious abuse,” he told me. 

Silberman, a Democrat, is running for reelection this fall against Ron Holmes, a Republican who has repeatedly run for sheriff and has made it clear that this is his driving ambition, in stark contrast with Silberman’s position that the office ought to be abolished.

Where can persons available to serve as poll monitors be best enlisted? I can travel. Do some states require you to be a resident to be a poll monitor? — @duanehere, on BlueSky

I took your question to Jeanette Senecal, who for the last 25 years has worked at the League of Women Voters, one of the nation’s chief civic engagement organizations. Her overarching message: “It’s never too late to engage in the election process.” The increase in threats and harassment against election officials since 2020, she says, ramped up a chronic need for workers, observers, and volunteers. 

If that interests you, broadly speaking, you’re allowed to engage in two ways. 

First, you could be a poll worker: You’d staff the local elections office to help them run a polling place or process ballots. This is crucial, Senecal says, so “voters have the staffing and support that they need when they go to the polling places.”

Many jurisdictions already have staffed up, but some say they still need help. As of publication, for instance, Arizona says that four of its 15 counties are looking for assistance. Senecal advises people to get in touch with their local elections office, or input their information in Power the Polls, a program the League helps run that connects people to election offices.

Second, you could be an election observer. Observers monitor that processes are compliant; typically, they don’t intervene. Observers can increase public trust, Senecal says. “You become a trusted messenger within your own network to help improve confidence within your networks.” But there are also concerns that people who echo Trump’s false allegations of widespread voter fraud will fill monitor roles and act in ways that intimidate election workers.

What this all means concretely varies greatly from place to place. The National Conference of State Legislatures has a comprehensive guide that lays it out for each state. And the Brennan Center has a series on the rules in the major battleground states. Senecal says people should start by getting in touch with a local organization with an established observation program.

Can you travel to fill any of these roles? That depends. Many states require poll workers and/or election observers to reside or even be registered to vote there. But some don’t; you don’t have to be a resident of Wisconsin to be an observer there, for instance. But for anyone who wishes to get involved away from home, Senecal stresses, “there’s a lot of get out the vote activities that people can support in jurisdictions that are not their own.”

The post What’s on Your Local Ballots: Your Questions Answered appeared first on Bolts.

The Arizona GOP put Proposition 137 on the ballot in June, amid widespread outrage over the state supreme court’s April decision to uphold a Civil War-era abortion ban. Within weeks of that ruling, the progressive group Progress Arizona launched a campaign to unseat two of the justices who sided with the majority and are up for retention this fall, Clint Bolick and Kathryn King, providing an outlet for voters put off by the decision and the court’s ideological makeup.

Prop 137, if it passes on Nov. 5, would nullify Bolick and King’s retention races that are taking place on the same day, as well as cancel future elections. 

The proposal is “a power grab,” said Abigail Jackson, digital director of Progress Arizona. “This was responding to the energy and the anger we saw around that decision. The extremist legislators who pushed the proposal forward did it with the intention of protecting these judges.” 

She added, “It is designed to take away our voices.”

Jake Faleschini, program director for the Alliance for Justice, a national organization that works to build progressive strength in the judiciary, points to a string of changes the GOP has pushed nationwide to consolidate power in state courts. In Arizona, Republicans last decade expanded the state supreme court and secured a strong conservative majority. 

“At the end of the day, they want policy outcomes from the courts and they are willing to change the rules to achieve that,” Faleschini told Bolts.

“What we are seeing now is a bit of an awakening from the left around just how important these courts are for maintaining our rights,” he said. “As these rights have been taken away by the [U.S.] Supreme Court, some of the state supreme courts are no longer there as willing participants in proactively protecting their rights.”

Supporters of Prop 137 say it is designed to insulate judges from such blowback against their rulings so they don’t have to pander to win votes. Republican Senator David Gowan, one of the measure’s chief sponsors, says he’s worried about national groups flooding state elections.

“This proposition makes it difficult for nefarious outsiders to manipulate our judicial process,” Gowan told Bolts. “We see a lot of dollars pour in from out of state to unseat judges who can’t defend themselves because they aren’t politicians.” 

Gowan, a conservative who used to be state Speaker, has a history of proposals that would override election results. He proposed a bill in 2021 to allow lawmakers to attribute Arizona’s electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate they choose, regardless of how people vote. 

This year’s Prop 137 would cancel retention elections for supreme court justices, judges on the state’s court of Appeals, and superior court judges in counties above 250,000 residents.

Currently, all judges first make it on the court through an appointment by the governor, though the state has some guardrails for who governors can choose: They must select their nominee from a shortlist of candidates assembled by a 16-member panel, though that panel’s members are also chosen by the governor. 

Once judges are on the court, they face regular performance reviews, as well as retention elections every four to six years that give the public some say; these races are ‘up-or-down’ questions, in which Arizona judges never face an opponent. As long as they win these retention tests, judges can stay on the court—up until the mandatory retirement age of 70. 

The system was approved by Arizona voters in 1974, with support from Sandra Day O’Connor, who at the time was a Republican state senator. After she retired from the U.S. Supreme Court in 2006, O’Connor worked to bring Arizona’s system to other states.

This year, the Arizona Judges Association, a professional organization that represents hundreds of judges, advocated for the measure to end retention elections. Jonathan Paton, a former GOP lawmaker who lobbies on their behalf, told lawmakers that scrapping retention elections would improve accountability because it’s too difficult for voters to make informed decisions on judges.

“I represent the Judges Association, and I don’t know who most of these people are that appear on the ballot,” Paton testified in the legislature. “So, do we think that the average voter knows?”

Paton is married to Court of Appeals Judge Angela Paton, who is also up for retention this fall and has been targeted by a progressive group. If Prop 137 passes, it would also nullify the results of her election. 

But many Arizona jurists don’t want the public to be cut out of the process of deciding who runs the courts, and the debate over Prop 137 created large rifts within the legal community. 

Retired Chief Justice Ruth McGregor, a former president of the Arizona Judges Association, spoke against Prop 137 at the launch event of Keep Courts Accountable, a political action committee formed in August to convince voters to reject the amendment. Former Chief Justice Scott Bales and former Justice John Pelander spoke at the event as well. 

Reached for comment, Paton would not say whether the Arizona Judges Association still backs the reform. The association’s website was taken offline in the last month. Paton also told Bolts that, as a lobbyist for judges, he cannot reply to questions about an active ballot measure.

“Without the vote of the people, the judges would have no accountability,” Felicia Rotellini, who chairs the Keep Courts Accountable PAC, told Bolts. “If there is no accountability to the people, then there is a motivation to lean towards their own ideological preferences, their personal preferences, their political preferences.”

“We will lose part of our democracy,” said Rotellini, who is also a former head of the state Democratic Party.

Arizona is among the 31 states that hold elections for their justices. Ending that practice would make it an outlier in the West, where many states adopted judicial elections during the Progressive Era as part of a broader wave to end corruption and cronyism. The 19 states that have no judicial elections are heavily concentrated in the northeast of the country.

In Arizona, a commission of laypeople and legal experts periodically reviews judges’ performance to determine if they meet the standards for the bench, based on surveys collected from attorneys, fellow judges and people who have appeared before them in court. The scores are shared with voters before each election to help voters decide whether to keep them based on standards of merit, such as legal ability and integrity, rather than political issues.

If Prop 137 is approved, judges would only go before the voters if they fail their performance review, a rarity in Arizona, or if they are convicted of certain crimes, declare bankruptcy, or foreclose upon a mortgage. Gowan is making the case that this reform would help voters make decisions that are a lot more informed.

“The judicial retention portion of the ballot, that’s two pages long,” he said. “If we take the high performing judges off the ballot, it allows the people to see the low-performing judges, and they are no longer able to hide in the crowd, because those are the ones we want to knock out.”

But Prop 137 would also modify the performance review process by injecting legislators into it: The majority party in each chamber would appoint a member to the otherwise nonpartisan commission charged with assessing judges for impartiality, temperament and expertise. 

According to Bales, the former chief justice who spoke at the launch of the PAC that opposes Prop 137, the change would “make judges more susceptible to criticisms from the legislature, and perhaps a little less susceptible to the kind of public input you get through the [election process].” 

Prop 137 would also give legislators authority to order investigations against judges suspected of “a pattern of malfeasance,” though the proposal does not define what activities would warrant such an inquiry. 

Bates worries this would empower legislators to attack judges they disagree with. “What I think this really is, is a blank check for any individual legislator who has a grievance against a judge or wants to get some political milage out of asserting a grievance against a judge,” he said.

The effort to end judicial terms in Arizona comes as reformers at the federal level are pushing for the inverse change of rolling back lifetime judicial appointments. Following revelations that U.S. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alitto accepted millions of dollars in undisclosed gifts from individuals with cases before the court, groups like Alliance for Justice are making the case that federal judges are not accountable enough and that the federal system needs stronger guardrails, such as term limits and an enforceable code of ethics.  

If Prop 137 passes, Arizona judges would look a lot more like the federal bench, Falschini said. They “would have zero accountability to the people, just like federal judges.” 

Bolick, one of the two justices up for retention this fall, published an opinion article in May in the Arizona Republic, arguing that it’s the campaign to oust him that’s responsible for politicizing the judiciary and diluting the state’s emphasis on merit.

Progressives, he wrote, are “weaponizing judicial retention” and “cynically harnessing anger over our recent abortion decision to replace us with justices who will rubber-stamp their ideological agenda.”

The latest efforts over Bolick’s reelection and Prop 137 are an escalation of fights that took off last decade, though. Republicans, led by former Governor Doug Ducey, changed the norms around court appointments, helping ensure courts would lean conservative. Their maneuvers allowed Ducey to appoint five of the seven justices currently sitting on the all-Republican court.

In 2016, Republicans expanded the state supreme court by adding two seats, enabling Ducey to appoint two new judges despite unanimous opposition from sitting justices.

Then, in 2019, Ducey upended the nominating commission to ensure he’d be able to nominate his preferred candidate. Earlier that year, the commission had refused to include Bill Montgomery, Maricopa County’s conservative prosecutor, on its shortlist for a judicial vacancy. Ducey then replaced some of the commission’s members, paving the way for the new panel to recommend Montgomery and for the governor to place him on the supreme court. 

Although no Arizona justice has ever lost a retention race, progressives in 2022 mounted an unusually solid effort to oust Montgomery, questioning his ideology and ethics. The justice also received relatively low performance scores in his evaluations, but was ultimately retained. 

But in Maricopa County, the largest county in the state, voters chose to not to retain three local judges, an unusual result. One of the ousted judges, Stephen Hopkins, was the only judge that year to fail to meet the performance standards of the review process. 

In March of this year, GOP lawmakers passed a resolution to end judicial elections through the state Senate; that was right before the supreme court’s decision on abortion. The House took up the bill months later, amid the surge of pro-choice activism against Bolick and King. The vote to advance the measure was strictly along party lines in both chambers, with all Republicans supporting it. 

State Senator Shawnna Bolick, a Republican who is married to Clint Bolick, voted in favor of the resolution that would end her spouse’s future elections. 

Democrats in 2022 also flipped the governor’s mansion, and this November they have a shot at gaining the legislature and controlling the state’s government for the first time since the 1960s. 

Republicans have reacted with frustration as they’ve lost their advantage in the state, and have pursued other steps to use this year’s ballot to limit the will of voters, including a measure to make it prohibitively difficult to qualify a citizen’s initiative. In Maricopa County, GOP candidates who have spread conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen are trying to win control over the elections systems. 

And if voters pass Prop 137 this fall, it would void the results of the concurrent retention races, including Bolick and King’s. 

But if they reject the amendment while ousting one or both of Bolick or King, Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs would have the power to nominate their replacements. 

Regardless, Hobbs will soon get her first appointment to the court. Justice Robert Brutinel, who was appointed to the court by Republican Governor Jan Brewer in 2010 and who dissented in the court’s decision to revive the abortion ban, announced on Tuesday that he is retiring.

For Faleschini, Prop 137 is about freezing the court’s conservative majority in place. “It’s not that they are looking for a change to the system to make it more fair and impartial,” he said. “They are seeking changes to make sure that the types of political justices they want on courts can stay.”

He added, “Republicans are concerned they will not win a statewide election again in a very long time. They think the only power they can hold onto is through the supreme court.”

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Last fall, Los Angeles started using new bail guidelines that required judges to set bail at affordable rates, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from sitting in court all day. In conjunction with her pretrial justice clinic, UCLA law professor Alicia Virani spent part of October 2023, the first month LA’s new bail schedule was in effect, observing court proceedings that seemed as quick and rote as an assembly line at LA’s largest courthouse. “They’re churning out pretrial decisions like a factory,” she told Bolts. 

Alongside volunteers from Courtwatch LA, Virani and her students witnessed higher bail amounts, and lower rates of release without having to pay bail, for Latinx defendants compared with Black or white defendants. “Various court watchers observed at [the main courthouse] what they felt was like a notably hostile environment towards Latinx folks who were in custody,” Virani said. The clinic and Courtwatch LA went on to publish their observations in a joint report, finding that cash bail was set in 68 percent of the over 200 cases they observed, and the median amount set was $100,000, double the statewide average and far more than the average Californian can afford. Judges are “just blatantly ignoring the law that they’re supposed to follow,” Virani told Bolts.

Choosing to set bail so high that there’s no hope of paying can mean the loss of a job, or a defendant’s ability to care for their children. These decisions can also carry life-altering consequences in a jail system where someone dies nearly once a week. But judges ultimately have the final word, and there are few mechanisms to challenge their decisions. “When a judge denies bail in a situation where it should not be denied, or sets bail in a situation where it shouldn’t have been set, we’re sort of stuck with that decision,” Ericka Wiley, a public defender in Los Angeles County, told Bolts.

For some organizers, bringing change to Los Angeles’ court system demands more than just updating its rules. They think that the county needs judges with a different approach, one more attentive to the pitfalls of incarceration—and in Los Angeles, that takes winning judicial elections. In 2022, a slate of four attorneys with a background in public defense or civil rights ran for judge with mixed results: One of them, Holly Hancock, won her election, while the others lost to opponents who followed the more conventional prosecutor-to-judge pipeline. 

A new set of public defenders is trying again this year. One, Kimberly Repecka, already won her seat in the March primary and will join Hancock on the Los Angeles Superior Court. Three others still face tests this fall: Wiley, as well as George Turner, Jr. and La Shae Henderson, are bidding to replace three retiring judges. In the March primaries, each grabbed one of the top two spots and advanced to the November runoffs. 

These candidates are running in separate countywide elections. But they’ve delivered similar messages. Last summer, they all participated in a judicial election bootcamp run by La Defensa, a community group that recently took over Courtwatch LA, and by the organization LA Forward. Now on the campaign trail, they insist that the job of a judge should be more about finding creative solutions to foster rehabilitation than doling out punishment. 

“We have over a half a century of experience in this apparatus, and we know that it doesn’t work,” Turner told Bolts. “It didn’t make sense 20 years ago and it doesn’t make sense now that you would have thousands of people in Los Angeles County in custody [who] haven’t been convicted of anything. It didn’t make sense then and it doesn’t make sense now that we would put someone in a cage without figuring out what led to the conduct.”

In the runup to the primary, Henderson, Turner, and Wiley joined forces, appearing at events together and forming an informal slate with a joint website and branded social media. Like their predecessors on the 2022 slate, they called themselves “The Defenders of Justice.” Prominent local progressives, like Los Angeles Controller Kenneth Mejia, endorsed all three candidates. 

Repecka, who won her seat in March after challenging an incumbent judge who had received a rare public rebuke from the state judicial oversight agency, did not join this “Defenders of Justice” grouping; she did, however, make campaign statements signaling that she broadly shares their beliefs on how the judiciary might work to reduce mass incarceration. Turner and Wiley are still campaigning as a team for the general election. But Henderson has since chosen to run her campaign separately and no longer appears on “Defenders for Justice”-branded material, though she told Bolts she still supports their mission. 

In November, Henderson and Wiley will face current prosecutors Sharon Ransom and Renee Rose, respectively. Turner is running against Steve Napolitano, a parole board attorney and Manhattan Beach city council member. 

In separate interviews, Henderson, Turner, and Wiley all said that they chose to run in part because they found themselves frustrated by judges’ reluctance to consider pre-trial release or implement alternatives to incarceration for their clients. “We’re finally starting to get to a place where the laws are starting to get more and more in tune with common sense and what is morally right,” Turner told Bolts. But, he said, “when you walk through the average courtroom, it hasn’t changed.” They argue that their experiences position them to implement reforms that California has adopted over the last decade—laws that allow the sealing of criminal records, expand access to mental health diversion, and permit judges to reduce incarcerated people’s sentences.

“As a public defender, when you go to that court every day, you see whether it’s being implemented,” Henderson said of the state’s new reforms. “That’s where the fight is, is taking it from off of the page of a book and getting people to really start to put it to action.” 

Win or lose, these public defenders are only running to take over just a few of the over 400 superior courts seats that adjudicate Los Angeles County criminal cases. While any change to how judges approach defendants will be incremental, Holly Hancock’s new daily routine illustrates what that sort of piecemeal scale change looks like in one courtroom. 

These days, Hancock, the lone winner from the original “Defenders of Justice” slate, presides over a misdemeanor court in Inglewood, where she most commonly sees DUI and domestic violence cases. She says her background as a public defender has shaped her use of judicial discretion and equipped her to take a more holistic approach to the defendants—one that incorporates an awareness of mental health and addiction issues, as well as an appreciation for how the collateral consequences of a criminal legal interaction can derail someone’s life. “It’s really in every area, at every step,” Hancock told Bolts. “I’ve always said it gives me an opportunity to be actually more even handed.”

At arraignments, Hancock said she makes sure to review what leeway she has on bail. When considering a defendant’s ability to pay, she’ll sometimes let them post the cash they’re able to raise directly to the court, in order to avoid the exorbitant interest rates that bondsmen charge. ”A lot of times it’s the family members or the girlfriends [who pay], it’s not even the person who’s in jail,” she said. “Grandma is now on the hook, or her house is on the hook. So I’d rather, if they can get the cash together, just post the cash.” 

Whenever possible, Hancock said, she diverts people toward programs that help them avoid a criminal conviction if they complete certain steps, like community service. She also refers people who need support with housing and other services to the county’s new Justice, Care, and Opportunities department, an agency created as part of a county-level effort to implement a “care first, jails last” approach toward crime. 

“You can work so many different things to assist people that don’t have anything to do with incarceration,” Hancock told Bolts about the misdemeanor cases she handles. 

The three public defenders currently in contention for a judicial seat told Bolts they would take a similar approach, prioritizing alternatives to incarceration and viewing jail or prison time as a final course of action rather than a default. “I’ve never seen someone come out of prison and be better overall… It’s a devastating experience and should be a last option when all others have failed,” Wiley said. 

Henderson said she’d like to see the principles of the youth justice system—rehabilitation and redemption over punishment—applied to adults well. “We kind of have this mindset that once you’re 18, you’re on your own and you messed up. But if we could bring more of that restorative style, even for the adults, I think it would prevent more recidivism,” she told Bolts. 

Henderson and Wiley’s opponents, Ransom and Rose, are both line prosecutors with the LA District Attorney’s office. Neither responded directly to a request for an interview, and a campaign consultant representing both candidates did not provide responses to a request for comment. On her website, Ransom touts her work in the DA’s mental health unit, writing that her “focus on community empowerment diverges from traditional prosecution.” Rose currently works as the supervisor of the DA’s elder abuse unit. Her website stresses that she has worked in many units of the DA’s office, “dedicating her entire legal career to the protection of crime victims.”

Napolitano, who faces Turner, told Bolts via email that he too supports alternatives to incarceration when appropriate. If elected, he said he’d “take advantage of work programs, community service programs, and educational programs for youth offenders as alternatives to juvenile hall which too often hardens kids against the system instead of them benefiting from it.”

Napolitano, who has worked as a parole hearing representative, administrative hearing officer, and local politician, added that he thinks Los Angeles would benefit from judges who have done multiple things in their careers, rather than career public defenders.

“We need more judges with diverse backgrounds who know our communities, who have worked with both victims and criminals, and who have the experience to know what works and what doesn’t,” Napolitano said.

The public defender candidates, though, believe that what sets them apart is the depth of their experiences representing indigent defendants.

Early in his career, Turner worked in the Los Angeles County public defender’s juvenile division in Inglewood, the predominantly Black and Latinx city where he grew up. “I would see kids who are going through the same sort of issues that I went through as a public school kid growing up in the city,” he recalled. “And I also saw the system not address their needs and kind of put them on a pathway to destruction in some cases.” Given these experiences, Turner said he feels that putting young people in an adult prison makes no sense from a developmental perspective. 

“I’ve been a victim myself of multiple crimes,” he told Bolts. “I have friends and family who have been killed. What happens in the courtroom doesn’t make you feel any better.” 

Like Turner, Henderson, who recently left the public defender’s office to set up her own criminal defense practice, worked in the juvenile division earlier in her career. She says she frequently watched judges treat Black and Latinx youth harshly, with little regard for their age. 

“That’s an opportunity to mentor, that’s an opportunity to speak into that kid’s life,” she told Bolts. “What would it look like if our courts facilitated that?”

Despite the recalcitrance of some judges and line prosecutors, a lot has changed in Los Angeles courts in the last decade. A broad effort to correct for some of the injustices of the tough-on-crime era has brought reforms at various levels, from a state supreme court decision that held that it is unconstitutional to imprison someone because they cannot afford bail, to ballot measures like Proposition 47, which downgraded some felonies to misdemeanors, to Los Angeles’ new bail schedule and the election of reform-minded politicians like DA George Gascón. 

These changes have already refashioned the role of judges in LA. Hancock noted that in her court, prosecutors are “by and large, far and away, not asking for incarceration on the misdemeanors,” meaning that judges who preside over misdemeanor court largely aren’t even in a position to approve jail time—nor do they have to go out on a limb to reject it. 

In theory, judges are also responsible for evaluating whether to transfer 16- and 17-year-olds to adult criminal court. But this only comes into play if prosecutors propose that move, and Gascón initially pledged that his office never would. Though he has walked back that blanket ban on prosecuting juveniles as adults, there have nonetheless been few opportunities for LA judges to make these determinations: Only 10 cases were recommended for transfer between when the DA took office in December 2020 and the end of January 2024. 

But this landscape may shift again this year. Repecka and any of the public defender candidates who wins their election this fall could take their seat in a different Los Angeles, one where prosecutors are pursuing notably harsher outcomes and where judges have more authority to crack down on low-level offenses.

Gascón faces a difficult reelection bid against Nathan Hochman, a former Republican candidate for state attorney general who has said he’d undo many of Gascón’s reforms. Hochman has vowed to seek harsher charges and sentences, criticized Gascón for being too lenient toward minors, and indicated he may seek the death penalty again, a practice that Gascón forbade.

A win by Hochman in the DA race may lead to a growth in the number of transfers to adult court or in the sorts of penalties sought for misdemeanor cases. Whether judges think it’s appropriate to treat a minor as an adult or order jail time for a misdemeanor could matter more under a different DA. And if line prosecutors are given more freedom to seek lengthy sentencing enhancements than under Gascón, judges would also have more occasion to impose significantly longer sentences.

Voters across California will also be deciding this fall whether to walk back Prop 47, the 2014 measure that helped the state lower its prison population from historic heights, but which has been much maligned lately by conservatives and business organizations who hold it to blame for retail theft. Under the terms of the ballot measure, judges would have significantly more discretion to punish defendants more harshly, though they’d retain the ability to send someone through the diversion process instead.

Turner noted the strangeness of running at a time when the ferocity of the backlash can feel at odds with the day-to-day work. 

“We’re almost in bizarro world, because if you look at the statistics, crime is down,” he said, a reference to police data that show robberies, homicide and violent crime rates in LA are lower than several years ago. “But part of the reason why I’m running and part of the reason why I am so vocal and active about these sorts of reforms, is because I don’t believe that [they’re] just a fad.” 

Turner ultimately takes the long view, stressing that calls for reform have come out of the decades-long failure of punitive solutions. “We can actually change these institutions,” he said. “And we should.”

The post Public Defenders Look to Grow Their Presence on the Bench in Los Angeles appeared first on Bolts.

By the time singer-songwriter Fiona Apple introduced the practice of courtwatching to millions of Americans last year, urging them to go observe the basic machinery of the criminal legal system at work, these programs had emerged all over the nation. Typically, they’re piloted by people critical of mass incarceration who hope to shed light on the everyday abuses defendants suffer when nobody’s looking. In Los Angeles, organizers visit one of the county’s 36 courts twice a month. In Baton Rouge, the Reverend Alexis Anderson is at the local courthouse almost every day. “Everywhere you’ve got a court, somebody needs to be watching it in real time,” she told me.

A new courtwatching effort has sprung up in San Francisco in recent years. Like the other groups, Stop Crime SF volunteers attend hearings and take notes. They emphasize the importance of transparency and public accountability. “San Francisco courts are notoriously opaque,” the group’s founder, Frank Noto, told me.

But Stop Crime SF is approaching courtwatching from essentially the opposite direction. Noto and his fellow members want harsher sentences for people with repeated violations, and they’re highly critical of judges who let people out on their own recognizance, meaning without money bail, to await trial. “At a time when drug overdose deaths are at an all-time high, many chronic drug dealers and other repeat violent felons are free on our streets because of overly lenient court rulings,” the group said in an August statement.

Now, as California’s March 5 elections approach, Stop Crime SF’s sister c(4) organization, Stop Crime Action, is jumping into the city’s judicial races and working to oust two sitting judges whom it says are fueling this crisis, Michael Isaku Begert and Patrick Thompson. The group, which is also led by Noto, is championing Chip Zecher and Jean Myungjin Roland, Begert and Thompson’s challengers, who are also running with heavy tech and venture capital money and support from the local police union. 

The response from Bay Area progressives has been furious, with City Supervisor Aaron Peskin urging voters to “reject this right-wing attack on San Francisco’s judiciary.” LaDoris Cordell, a former superior court judge in Santa Clara County, south of San Francisco, said she worries that “you may see a sea change in how judges behave” if Stop Crime SF’s effort succeeds and Begert and Thompson are removed. 

“These judges are going to start handing down harsher sentences and who is it going to impact?” Cordell told Bolts. “Poor people, people of color, and here we go again.”

San Francisco has in recent years been embroiled in an intense debate over policing and incarceration that attracted national attention when the city elected and then quickly recalled progressive DA Chesa Boudin. In the years since, Boudin’s critics have continued blaming progressive reforms for crime and drug problems in the city, benefiting from an alliance with a fleet of billionaires who have used their considerable resources to boost politicians and legislation with a more punitive approach.

The latest offensive against San Francisco’s judges fits into this broader playbook. Still, the fact that advocates for greater punishment are using an approach crafted by proponents of criminal legal reform renders it more confounding. On its own, courtwatching is essentially neutral, and its empirical nature seems to render it trustworthy. The question is: Who’s watching? And what happens next?

The California prison population ballooned from just over 21,000 in 1978 to over 175,000 at its peak in 2006, driven in part by some judges’ tendency to maximize sentences. And the perception that voters would only support tough-on-crime officials has also shaped how the judiciary has approached its work. 

“When I started as a baby judge, and I was first appointed, one of the older judges came to me and said, ‘Look, if you don’t want to get reversed in criminal cases, just throw the book at everybody,’” Cordell recalls. 

Later, when she ran for reelection, Cordell was attacked for being too soft with defendants. “My opponent was this hard-nosed DA, and he put out, ‘she’s just a Rose Bird clone,’” she told me. That’s a reference to former California Chief Justice Rose Bird, who faced years of reprisals from conservative groups for overturning death sentences as unconstitutional. In 1986, residents voted decisively to remove her from office. 

Cordell prevailed and secured reelection, though, ultimately staying on the Santa Clara superior court from 1988 to her retirement in 2001.

These battles have picked up in recent years. Santa Clara voters recalled Judge Aaron Persky in 2018 after he gave Stanford student Brock Turner a three-month sentence for sexual assault. Turner was required to register as a sex offender for life, but after the case made national news, some onlookers found the sentence unforgivably light and levied a campaign against the judge. 

Inversely, also in 2018, four San Francisco public defenders ran from the left against sitting superior court judges; all lost, though one of them was elected the following cycle. In 2022, Angelenos elected a public defender to the bench who ran on a goal of lowering incarceration rates and criticized sitting judges for stubbornly resisting sentencing reforms. 

Progressives’ wins in judicial races came alongside their takeover of DA offices in San Francisco in 2019 with Boudin and Los Angeles in 2020 with George Gascón, outcomes that intensified pushback from critics of criminal justice reform. 

Noto, a former lobbyist for real estate developers, started Stop Crime SF as a neighborhood group back in 2017, advocating for more resources for police and new legislation to prevent car break-ins. The group promptly took on Boudin after his election and later supported the effort to recall him. That November, Joel Engardio, who was Stop Crime SF’s executive director, ousted an incumbent supervisor. 

During this time, the group expanded its scope to scrutinize the bench, building a courtwatch program to get volunteers to study how judges responded to property crimes. “We wanted to make sure that judges understood, that the district attorney understood, that these are important too and they just couldn’t ignore this,” Noto told me. Eventually they began tracking responses to violent crime and drug offenses as well. 

Stop Crime SF’s approach gained a powerful ally when Brooke Jenkins was appointed DA by Mayor London Breed to replace Boudin. Before her appointment, Jenkins was paid over $150,000 to consult for Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, a group that heavily supported the recall effort and has also backed Stop Crime SF. 

Jenkins promptly clashed with local judges. When she said she would prosecute some 16 and 17 year olds as adults, the lowest age state law would allow, a veteran judge, J. Anthony Kline, refused to send any young people into the adult court system. In response, Jenkins’ office began blanket-challenging him, which effectively removed Kline’s entire case load. Jenkins also told ABC that “judges are refusing to make sure that these individuals stay in custody, and that has to change.” At a town hall in the summer of 2023, the DA excoriated local judges for releasing defendants with multiple drug offenses pre-trial, rather than keeping them locked up. 

Zecher, one of the candidates endorsed by Stop Crime Action, told the San Francisco Chronicle that he was inspired to run by a comment Jenkins made urging challenges to sitting judges. Zecher, a corporate lawyer on the board of UC Law San Francisco, did not agree to a request for an interview for this article.

Boudin believes his successor has been “scapegoating” judges to deflect from her own responsibility, also pointing to Breed, an ally of Jenkins who last year vociferously criticized a federal judge for upholding a ban on of homeless encampments as long as the city lacks sufficient shelter beds. “They both leaned so heavily into the doom-loop, fearmongering approach to defining San Francisco as a way to get me out of office, and now they own the problems and the perceptions,” he told Bolts. “They can’t shake it and so they’re looking for someone else to blame.”

Breed, who like Jenkins is up for reelection in November, is also championing a wide-ranging ballot measure on March 5, Proposition E, that would expand the powers of the local police; Stop Crime Action has endorsed it. Another measure, Proposition B, would increase the size of the police force, but only if the city creates new taxes to pay for it, a condition that troubles police advocates; one of its chief opponents, Axios reports, sits on the board of Stop Crime SF.

Over the last year, Stop Crime SF’s courtwatching program, and its accusations that the local bench is fostering crime, have morphed into an effort to outright remove two local judges whom the group says exemplify this behavior. Noto wrote in the organization’s newsletter in November that Begert and Thompson “have a demonstrated track record of releasing serious and dangerous offenders back into the public.”

Begert presides over several of San Francisco’s collaborative courts, where judges either try to formulate a treatment plan for people who are jailed, or get people into services as an alternative to incarceration. He also oversees San Francisco’s CARE court, where people close to someone with substance abuse or mental health issues can petition the court to mandate treatment—a program that has also proved controversial on the left because of concerns around civil rights.

Begert told Bolts in an interview that he believes he is being targeted because of his work on the collaborative courts, alleging that his critics are pursuing an agenda that’s single-mindedly punitive.

“Why me?” he asked. “Because I’m running these treatment courts, and these treatment courts are built on trying to address the underlying causes of criminal behavior, to increase public safety by reducing future conduct. And if your primary motivation is to impose punishments on people, or to accomplish what we call in legal philosophy retribution—that’s not furthering your objectives.”

Noto rejects the notion that he’s politicizing the judiciary. He says his group is largely looking to promote transparency, and that its decisions about which judges to target stem from external feedback.

In the lead-up to the 2024 elections, Stop Crime Action released what it called a judicial “report card” that rated judges whose terms end in 2024, and gave both Begert and Thompson (and no one else) failing grades. According to The San Francisco Standard, the group drew on cases that were tracked by courtwatchers and a variety of other factors, including a survey the group sent out to local trial attorneys. 

But the group only received roughly 25 answers—most of them, perhaps unsurprisingly, from prosecutors rather than judges and defense lawyers. Mission Local reported that the group misrepresented a single person’s assessment in a way that implied numerous negative reviews. 

“I have no objection to engaging with the public and having people see what we do,” Begert told Bolts. “I think we should have more of that. My objection is to coming into the project with a political agenda.”

The other targeted judge, Patrick Thompson, handles preliminary hearings; he evaluates evidence to determine whether the case will continue to trial. Much of the criticism against him in the Stop Crime Action report card centers on cases where he released defendants with past convictions on their own recognizance pending their trial. 

The San Francisco Chronicle found this month that, in a number of the cases, Thompson’s decision to release received no objection from the prosecutor on the case, meaning that all parties agreed the defendant should be released pending trial. Lara Bazelon, a law professor who advocates for criminal justice reforms in San Francisco, says pretrial detention is legally considered a final course of action. “It’s the resort only after every other less restrictive alternative has been considered and rejected,” she said. “And that’s because when you lock someone up pretrial, you’re taking someone that is presumed innocent, and taking away their freedom for weeks or months or even years at a time.”

Thompson did not respond to a request for an interview, nor did his opponent Roland, who currently works as a prosecutor in Jenkins’s office. 

The San Francisco Bar Association, the more traditional rating system for local judges, rates each of Thompson and Begert as “well-qualified.” Zecher and Roland received no ratings from the bar association because they declined to participate in the process, an unusual decision.

The president of the association told KQED in December that she’s worried about attacks on “the independence of the judiciary.” Boudin echoed that concern, telling Bolts that judges are constrained in how they can defend themselves; he pointed to state rules known as the judicial canons that prohibit judges from talking about the cases in front of them. “Unsurprisingly, they’ve chosen people who are uniquely vulnerable,” he said. 

Courtwatchers on the left view judges as too prone to detain defendants pretrial and throw the book at them—even beyond what the law requires. Stop Crime SF, meanwhile, sends its members into courtrooms to observe criminal cases with a form asking them to rate whether “defendants were held accountable for their actions by the court.” The form defines accountability, among other things, as whether a judge sets money bail and ultimately sentences someone at—or beyond—sentencing guidelines. 

Progressive courtwatchers elsewhere have taken note of the effort in San Francisco. And while their goals differ significantly, some say they support more scrutiny on the courts on principle, since they believe courts’ opacity to the public has produced harmful results overall.

Courtwatch LA also has a website, Rate My Judge, where community members and lawyers can weigh in on their experience in court. A lot of the negative reviews center on judges’ treatment of the people in their court, but some are outcome-focused, too—one judge’s page has several comments alleging that he categorically denies resentencing petitions. They also plan to challenge judges in the future, though they would not consider a score statistically significant until it was composed of at least 45 reviews.

“I think it is something the left has to sort out or at least accept as inevitably a two way street,” said Bazelon. “Courts are open to the public. There’s nothing unlawful or untoward about going and observing what happens in court. And I don’t think it should come as any surprise that it’s going to be a tool that both sides are going to use.”

The Los Angeles organizers tend to also distrust the assessments by professional groups like the bar association, arguing that while they’re purportedly neutral, they’re biased against candidates of color and women, and against lawyers opposed to the status quo. They say their approach brings in a different, necessary perspective.

“At the end of the day, it is a community tool,” said Titilayọ Rasaki, policy and campaigns strategist for La Defensa, the Los Angeles organization that runs Courtwatch LA. “I think it’s just a question of who’s in and who’s out in your community.” She noted that many of Courtwatch LA’s volunteers have had past contact with the criminal legal system. For these people, she said, “it’s a kind of reclamation, or a way of shifting your relationship to the criminal legal system that has probably impacted your life in vastly different ways.”

Rasaki and her colleague Gabriela Vázquez, deputy director of La Defensa, told me that they weren’t threatened by Stop Crime SF’s use of a similar playbook. In their eyes, the problem with what’s happening in San Francisco is not that incumbent judges face scrutiny or opponents; it’s the “scare tactics” employed against them. “If we have a drug overdose epidemic, the easy way out is just criminalizing people, or attacking judges,” Vázquez said. “What we’re seeing in the Bay Area is that they’re trying to take the easy way out and find scapegoats.”

Still, Rasaki said she welcomes anyone to courtwatch. If they feel comfortable with how poorly people are treated and how easily they’re incarcerated, she said, “that’s a value judgment for them… We can disagree and we can use different organizing strategies and the ballot box, I guess—this is where we’re duking it out. It’s a contention of ideals.” 

“If it gets more people in the courts, if it gets more discourse about what it is that the courts are up to, and whether or not they’re meeting the needs of our society—that’s a conversation I’m really trying to start,” she said.

The post In Pursuit of Harsher Punishments, San Francisco Courtwatchers Target Judges appeared first on Bolts.

There’s something odd about next month’s ballot in Arkansas. 

Voters are filling two supreme court seats in two separate nonpartisan elections. Neither seat’s current occupant is seeking a new term, so at first glance it may look like the cycle will add two fresh faces to the court. But of the six candidates running for these two seats, four are already sitting justices on the court—they just want to shift into different seats than their own. 

If justices who already sit on the supreme court win either of those seats, they would then need to resign from their current positions. This would create vacancies that would be filled by the state’s staunchly conservative governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a reshuffling that’s poised to accelerate the court’s shift toward a solidly right-wing majority. 

“Almost inevitably, the governor is going to end up with some appointments here,” said Jay Barth, a professor emeritus at Hendrix College who has long studied Arkansas politics. “And the more she gets, the more conservative the court is likely to get as well.” 

The only two candidates not already on the court face tough odds, crushed by their opponents’ name recognition and fundraising. Each told Bolts that they’re concerned about the prospect of the governor shaping the court’s membership when justices are supposed to be chosen by voters. 

Many states select justices via elections, but then stretch the spirit of that approach. Justices in other states routinely resign before their term is up, enabling governors to name a replacement; in Minnesota, for instance, all current justices owe their seat to an appointment despite the state’s election system. As Bolts has reported, a loophole in Georgia law has even allowed state justices and other officials to maneuver to outright cancel some judicial elections.

In Arkansas, the reasons for this situation are very different across the two elections. One of the two open supreme court races this year is to replace Chief Justice John Dan Kemp, who is retiring rather than seek a new term. Three of the court’s associate justices—Karen Baker, Barbara Webb, and Rhonda Wood—are running for the open chief justice position, which is akin to seeking a promotion, since the chief justice has broad responsibilities over supervising the state’s judicial system. 

It’s not unusual for an associate justice to run for chief justice, but already sitting on the court is not a necessary stepping stone. Kemp was not on the court in 2016 when he successfully ran for chief justice. This year too, there’s a candidate running from the outside: Jay Martin, an attorney and former lawmaker, argues it’s an asset that he’s not already a justice. “I just think that we need a fresh pair of eyes on the court in the role of chief justice,” Martin told Bolts. (This race will head to a November runoff if no one tops 50 percent on March 5.)

Arkansas’ other open supreme court race is a special election that was triggered by the death last summer of Associate Justice Robin Wynne. It pits another outsider to the supreme court—Carlton Jones, a lower-court judge—against another sitting associate justice, Courtney Hudson, who is attempting to switch to the open associate justice seat. (With only two candidates in this race, one of them is sure to win outright in March.)

There’s no promotion at play here; Hudson’s current seat (“Position 3”) and the seat she is running for (“Position 2”) both fill the same role. What’s different between them is the timing of their elections. 

“By running for Position 2, I can potentially serve longer as a justice on the Court and continue my work of ensuring that everyone benefits from the goodness and protection of the law,” Hudson told Bolts this week.

Switching seats would allow Hudson to spend more time on the court, circumventing the state’s retirement age by a few extra years. Arkansas rules strip justices of retirement benefits if they run for reelection past age 70 but don’t force them to resign once they hit 70; justices can finish whatever term they’re already serving without endangering their benefits, thus the exact timing of their terms determines when they must retire. 

For Hudson, these are all considerations for a very distant future since she is only 51. Even if she stayed in her current seat, the earliest she’d have to retire is 2042. But if she succeeds at moving into the new seat this election, she’d be allowed to run as late as 2038 and serve out a final eight-year term until 2046—a potential four additional years on the court.

Jones, the lower-court judge challenging Hudson for the open seat, told Bolts in an interview that Hudson’s motivation for running was a “personal want,” comparing it unfavorably to what he called her three colleagues’ “legitimate reason” to run for chief justice. He added that a vacancy created by a Hudson win would be an “artificial opening” because of how unnecessary it is, and that this would betray the selection system that allows Arkansans to “express their choice through the ballot box.”   

“These offices, they belong to the citizens of the state of Arkansas, and we should be doing those things that best serve them,” he added. 

Hudson dismissed Jones’ concerns about her decision, saying it’s wrong to litigate the fate of the Position 3 seat during the campaign for Position 2. She said her experience makes her the best option to fill the open seat, telling Bolts, “The job of a Supreme Court Justice is far too important to wait for ‘on the job training’ to occur.” 

Martin, who is challenging three sitting associate justices for the chief justice seat, says he does not fault his opponents for trying to “step up” into the role. But he echoed Jones’ assessment that these races, and the prospect of gubernatorial appointments looming over them, are in tension with the state’s commitment to judicial elections, a system that was ratified by voters in a 2000 ballot initiative. 

“Arkansans made the decision to elect our judges, and not have the governor appoint judges,” Martin told Bolts. “We value electing judges.” 

Wood, one of Martin’s opponents, does not share his concern, telling Bolts via email, “I believe the people of Arkansas would prefer an experienced Chief Justice with a proven judicial record versus risking the Chief Justice position on someone with no judicial experience only because some would prefer the Constitution provided an alternative method for filling the temporary vacancy.” Baker and Webb did not reply to requests for comment.

A vacancy in Arkansas sparks a special election in the next even-numbered year, and an appointed justice cannot run for a full term. So if Huckabee Sanders chooses one or two new justices, they’d serve for up to two and a half years; then, there’d be new open elections for those seats in 2026. 

After Wynne’s death, for instance, the governor replaced him by appointing Cody Hiland, who was thus barred from running for the seat in the special election this year. But Barth says he expects Hiland to be on the shortlist for a new appointment to fill any vacancies that may result from the 2024 elections, which would extend his term on the court without facing voters to roughly three years. Hiland dodged the question of a reappointment when asked by The Arkansas Times earlier this month.

And important cases are looming just over the next few years, such as the challenge to a state law passed in 2023 that has significantly weakened direct democracy in the state. Relatedly, transparency advocates are embroiled in a legal saga against the state’s Republican attorney general who has blocked some popular initiatives from moving forward; the court is likely to weigh in on the fate of several ballot initiatives in coming years.

The reshuffling of the court also comes at a time of quick ascendancy for Arkansas conservatives.

While the state leans firmly to the right, its judiciary is divided between a more centrist and a more conservative wing, with recent elections producing some victories for the former. In 2022, conservatives failed in their effort to oust two justices whom they deemed to be too moderate—Baker, who is now running for chief justice, and Wynne, who passed away last year. 

Those two justices, plus Hudson, formed an informal group of three moderates on the seven-member court. Barth says that Kemp, the retiring chief justice who was first elected in 2016, typically issued conservative rulings but sometimes sided with his more moderate colleagues. But Wynne’s death last year, and his temporary replacement with Hiland, a conservative, set up a more reliably conservative majority on the court made up of Hiland, as well as Webb and Wood, who are both now running for chief justice, and Shawn Womack, an associate justice who is running for reelection unopposed this year. 

Kemp’s retirement could leave Baker and Hudson as the only two justices left on the court who have a more moderate reputation. Both are sure to stay on the supreme court no matter how they fare this year in their effort to switch seats. But if they win their upcoming races, the resulting appointments by Huckabee Sanders may shift the court yet another step to the right. 

“It’s pretty clear that the governor will attempt to appoint conservatives in those positions, that’s been the nature of her appointments so far,” Barth said. 

In their respective interviews with Bolts, Jones and Martin—the would-be newcomers to the court—each downplayed having ideological commitments, highlighting their independence. WIth candidates for judge in Arkansas running without any party label, that all makes it risky to predict how the court would rule on any issue even if they were to win. 

Still, both have run for past offices as Democrats. Jones became prosecuting attorney in Lafayette and Miller counties, in southwestern Arkansas, running as a Democrat in 2010; he served until becoming a circuit judge in 2014. Martin, who says he’s now an independent, was a Democratic lawmaker and House Majority Leader in the mid-2000s, right before the state’s hard swing toward the GOP. He also ran for governor in 2022, coming in a distant third in the Democratic primary. 

As he now runs against three sitting justices at once, Martin embraces his outsider status as the thing that distinguishes his campaign, even as his opponents hold it against him. “The presumption that any necessary change is stalled because there is not an outsider on the court is wrong,” Wood, one of the justices on the ballot, told Bolts in an email. “The Chief Justice role is not one that you can learn on the job.” Wood says she has goals of improving the court system, such as setting up a “web portal for victims of domestic violence” to file their documents.

Martin insists that his experience is relevant to the position. A volunteer pastor in Little Rock, he points to past activities like his involvement in an expungement clinic through his church as an example of the outsider’s perspective he’d want to bring. “I think that community involvement is very important to break up the status quo,” he told Bolts, denouncing the fact that many Arkansans lack access to legal help and end up unsuccessfully representing themselves in expungement proceedings or civil disputes with landlords. 

Martin also told Bolts that his background as a former legislator would prime him to talk to lawmakers and identify funding sources in budget negotiations. He vowed to be “the chief advocate for more pro bono work for attorneys and law students” to improve the legal representation people receive. 

“We can do a better job of providing services,” he said. Of his opponents who are already on the court, Martin added, “I think that it’s just easy to maintain the status quo after a number of years.”

The post Judges Play Musical Chairs on Arkansas’ Highest Court appeared first on Bolts.

Most obviously, these courts have become an urgent route for liberal litigants in light of conservatives’ durable majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. State courts get to interpret state constitutions, which often protect rights and liberties more expansively than the U.S. Constitution, and they’ve proven friendly to arguments that wouldn’t succeed in federal court. The right has also focused on them to expand its control over the judiciary.

But these courts have even more clout than you may realize. They can shape virtually any policy area that state and local governments touch. They’re likely to have the final word on all cases filed in state courts, and many play additional roles that extend far beyond deciding cases, from crafting the rules of criminal trials to taking part in redistricting and certifying elections.

And yet these courts’ exact powers and procedures often remain well under the radar. What justices do and how they’re selected varies widely from state to state, and it always differs from the federal system. Most states elect justices but have their own twist on electoral rules, while some courts are shaped by commissions largely out of public view—and nearly all serve some idiosyncratic function with little scrutiny. These distinctions all influence how each court acts and what might be levers of change.

Today Bolts is publishing a new state-by-state resource that plunges into the weeds of these critical judicial powers. For each of 54 courts—accounting for the highest court in all 50 states, two of which have two separate high courts, plus Puerto Rico and D.C.—we cover every nook and cranny of how they are organized, what functions they serve, and rules for judicial selection.

But here we also wanted to take a step back. Why should we care about state supreme courts? What types of cases do they even hear? And what do we know about the balance of power between liberals and conservatives foothold on these courts across the country? Below is our FAQ to answer your big questions on state supreme courts.

I follow the U.S. Supreme Court: Why also care about state supreme courts?

If state and local governments have any involvement in an issue, you can bet that state supreme courts shape public policy on it. Why is abortion more widely available in this state than in neighboring ones? Why are police officers harder to prosecute in one jurisdiction over another? Why does this state better protect the rights of employees or access to mail-in ballots? The answer often has to do with how legal cases were resolved by state supreme courts, and who was sitting on them when they did.

In fact, many cases begin and end in state court, and never interact with federal judges. That includes countless civil lawsuits, and the vast majority of criminal prosecutions. These cases are heard within each state’s separate judicial system, and then work their way to the top state court that has supreme authority over their outcomes.

That’s how state supreme courts end up with the final word on critical cases—whether a lawsuit against South Carolina’s abortion restrictions, the appeal of a death sentence in Florida, or the legal battle over Illinois pensions. Some of these high courts also have idiosyncratic roles such as drafting bail schedules or approving pardons, and they can shape the rest of the judicial branch: That’s information that Bolts’ new state-by-state resource supplies.

Why would a case end up in state courts instead of federal court?

By-and-large, federal cases involve allegations that something or someone violated federal laws or the U.S. Constitution, or involve large financial amounts, inter-state disputes, or federal agencies. 

Everything else is likely to end up in state court, and possibly escalate to a state supreme court. 

These can be civil cases—you can bring a lawsuit in state court, especially if you’re invoking your state’s laws or your state’s constitution—or they can be criminal cases. Every state has its own criminal laws, and local prosecutors can charge people for breaking them in state courts; and if you’re convicted of a crime, you can appeal all the way to your state’s high court. 

What’s the role of state constitutions?

The rights inscribed in the U.S. Constitution only set a floor. Each state has a constitution that may have different language or protect rights that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t, at least if a state supreme court interprets it that way. How receptive a given court will be to such arguments, of course, will depend on its membership.

For instance, the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual” punishments is mirrored in many state constitutions, with some even banning “cruel or unusual” punishments, a grammatical tweak that may justify more expansive protections. And in each state, the supreme court will effectively have the final word on what exactly those clauses forbid.

In light of federal courts’ sharp turn to the right, many progressive and civil rights groups have prioritized filing state lawsuits by crafting arguments that rely on their own state’s constitution. They may argue, for instance, that its language enjoins climate action or protects reproductive rights.

But can’t the U.S. Supreme Court step in regardless? 

Yes, if you’re unhappy with how your state supreme court decided your case, you typically can appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. But that court hears very few cases. It’s also extraordinarily unlikely to consider a case that involves a state supreme court interpreting its own state’s constitution or statutes.

In practice, state supreme courts have the final word on what rights their state constitutions provide, and on nearly all cases and lawsuits that work their way through the state court systems. 

So what do these state supreme courts do, day-to-day?

Their primary role is to review decisions made by lower courts. Every state has its own judicial pyramid, like the federal system: there are trial courts, typically appeals courts, and a supreme court at the top. (There are variations on this structure; most notably, Oklahoma and Texas have separate high courts for criminal and civil matters.)

State supreme court justices decide whether to take up a case for review. 

But these courts also serve many other functions. Most are responsible for supervising the operations of their state’s entire judicial branch, putting them in charge of vast bureaucracies. They appoint people to key spots, and decide on rules that everyone else must follow, from attorneys to lower-court judges. In many states they also write the detailed procedures that govern any criminal case, including major matters like how bail or sentences are calculated.

Some courts have even more direct powers. In Arizona, justices witness election certification. In Nevada, they sit on the pardon board. In Tennessee, they appoint the attorney general.

Our state-by-state database highlights these unique powers for every high court, including the role each plays in crafting the rules of criminal procedures, and in various tasks relating to elections.

How do states decide who sits on their supreme courts? 

Every state sets its own rules for how justices are selected and how they remain on the court, and no two states do it exactly the same—and none do it exactly like the U.S. Supreme Court.

One rare trait that unites nearly all states is that justices serve set terms. They are on their court for defined periods of time and then must seek a new term. Only in Rhode Island do they serve for life with no age restrictions, like they do on the U.S. Supreme Court. 

This alone makes the membership of state courts far more fluid than the U.S. Supreme Court’s. To top it off, some states even impose a mandatory retirement age, often between 70 and 75. 

Otherwise, state systems differ a great deal. Broadly speaking, they fall into two big buckets as to how justices make it on the court.

Some states elect their justices from the get-go. People not yet on the court can run for a seat, and incumbents who want new terms may face challengers. States like North Carolina and Wisconsin, for instance, consistently have heated judicial elections. 

In other states like Indiana and Vermont, justices are always first appointed onto the court, typically by a governor. But these states vary on whether an appointed justice faces elections once they’re on the court. In many states, justices must face retention elections at the end of their term—up-or-down elections in which voters decide whether an incumbent can stay on the court. 

States also vary on how much latitude governors have when they select a justice: Some governors are free to choose anyone without even worrying about legislative confirmation. Governors making high court appointments in other states, like Missouri, are much more constrained and must choose from a shortlist preselected by a nominating commission over which they may have little control. And in Virginia and South Carolina, supreme court appointments are made by lawmakers with little involvement from the governor.

In practice, though, the difference between elections and appointments can get very blurry. 

Take Minnesota and Georgia, which have regular judicial elections but nearly all sitting justices first made it onto the court through an appointment. That’s because justices often resign before their term is over, letting governors select a replacement with little constraint. Once appointed, these incumbents rarely face any opposition when they run for a full term. 

Does my state have elections? 

Thirty-one states organize some sort of elections for supreme court justices. 

In some states, justices only face voters once they’ve already been on the court for a few years, and only in the form of retention elections—no named challengers, just a yes-or-no vote on whether they should stay on the court.

Other states organize regular elections for all judicial seats: Every few years, any candidate who meets the qualifications to be a judge can run for a seat whether or not there’s an incumbent, and the winner joins the court. That sounds simple enough, but each state comes with some twist. Elections may be held at odd times, they may be canceled at the drop of a hat, and they may be governed by unusual rules that don’t apply to the state’s more prominent elections. 

To complicate matters further, states may also mix up these models, using either regular or retention rules depending on the circumstances. 

Are judges partisan or political officials?

Only nine states elect judges in partisan elections. Candidates there may file to run as a Democrat or Republican. 

Still, in states that hold nonpartisan elections, parties and groups that support a political cause frequently get involved. Elections in Wisconsin are ostensibly nonpartisan, for instance, but are also very polarized. Other states with nonpartisan systems have sleepier elections. 

Similarly, in states where justices are appointed, party affiliation is not a formal factor in the process, but the political leanings of prospective appointees are often a factor on the decisions of the governors or lawmakers who make the selection—much like in the federal system.

That may be true even in states that constrain a governor to a list preselected by a nominating commission made up of legal professionals—a process that is meant to be more meritocratic but does not eliminate political considerations. The shortlist may present various options that preserve a governor’s ability to shape the court’s direction, and some commissions also have an ideological bent. There’s often backdoor maneuvering about who sits on them, with governors or legislative leaders shaping their  membership. Florida’s commission, for instance, has helped Governor Ron DeSantis move the state’s high court to the right, while New York’s has faced scrutiny for leaving jurists of color off of nominating lists. In Iowa, the GOP recently changed its commission to give the governor more control over who sits on the commission.

Can you tell me which party, or which ideological side, controls which court?

This is a difficult question. Only 12 high courts explicitly integrate justices’ party affiliation into their selection. That’s usually because the justices are elected in partisan elections, but it may also be because there’s a formal requirement (Delaware) or informal convention (New Jersey) that there be some partisan balance on the court.

In those states, it’s at least possible to say which party holds a majority of the court.

As of today, 6 of these courts have a Republican majority and 6 have a Democratic majority. (Two of those Republican majorities are in Texas, which is a rare state with two high courts.)

But judicial philosophies do not always map onto judges’ partisan affiliation.

Inversely, courts that are technically nonpartisan may have a strong ideological lean. They may have a coherent majority that constantly favors liberals or conservatives, or justices whose careers demonstrate a strong affiliation to a political cause. In Arkansas, for instance, a majority of supreme court justices now have ties with the Republican Party after Governor Huckabee Sanders appointed the chair of the state GOP to the court this summer. Wisconsin’s court flipped from a conservative majority to a liberal one as a consequence of the 2023 elections. New York’s conservative-leaning court took a step to the left this spring after a heated battle in which progressive groups fought the governor’s initial nomination. 

Assessing a court’s politics may then entail identifying other proxies for judicial ideology. In states with judicial appointments, we can start by assessing the party of the governors who selected the justices. In Minnesota, for instance, all justices as of now have been appointed by a Democrat, while in Arizona they’ve all been appointed by a Republican. 

This is a reliable predictor in some states—but it can be an imperfect proxy in others since some governors must get their choices approved by the legislature, or are constrained to choosing from a commission’s shortlist. Then again, governors can try to craft these commissions to their liking to gain more influence over the process, frequently far out of view of the general public.

The devil is in the details, which is why Bolts’ state-by-state database lays out more information on each court’s process.

How do state supreme courts affect a specific issue I care about?

On any issue, lawsuits may put a state’s statutes and practices under court scrutiny, at which point it comes down to what’s written in the state’s constitution and laws—and who has the power to interpret them. Many courts also have rulemaking powers that give them the ability to upend some matters even more directly. Here are some examples of what to watch on just six key issues.

If you care about abortion rights: The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, but state supreme courts can interpret their own constitution as recognizing a right to abortion. A Bolts analysis found that a dozen had done so by the time of the Dobbs ruling, and more since. But conservative gains can undo these rulings. In 2018, Iowa’s supreme court ruled that the Iowa constitution guarantees a right to abortion but then reversed itself in 2022 after the arrival of new conservative justices. 

If you care about criminal justice: State courts shape the rights of people accused of crimes at every stage of a criminal case, and some courts have pushed back more than others against invasive police practices or extreme sentences. Many supreme courts also write their state’s rules of criminal procedure—lengthy codes that govern how cases unfold, from the issuance of warrants to the calculation of sentences. Some courts even set bail schedules. This is an often-overlooked but potent policymaking role. In 2021, for instance, Arizona’s supreme court eliminated peremptory strikes, the practice by which attorneys can eliminate someone from the jury pool without stating a cause. Explore our state-by-state guide to learn the extent of each court’s rulemaking role with regards to criminal procedure; the guide also specifies for each court whether a court is involved in drafting sentencing guidelines and setting bail schedules.

If you care about LGBT rights: Some state constitutions provide greater protections for individual rights than the U.S. Constitution, and LGBT activists have turned to state courts when federal courts have been unwilling to affirm certain rights. In 2003, Massachusetts’ supreme court recognized marriage equality, setting off a wave of supreme courts that did the same before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationally. And as states are now passing new anti-trans legislation, state advocates are again turning to state courts.

If you care about education: Many state constitutions contain provisions that state courts have interpreted as creating a right to education, and activists have argued in court since the 1970s that unequally or inadequately funding schools is unconstitutional.

If you care about the environment: As the climate crisis rages on, the regulatory power of environmental agencies often hinges on decisions by state supreme courts. Plaintiffs have also invoked environmental rights to push for climate action, with some success; Hawaii’s supreme courts, for instance, recently affirmed a robust interpretation of such rights in its state constitution, and a case in Montana that involves a right to a “healthful environment” could soon make its way to that state’s supreme court.

If you care about how elections are run: The shape of democracy can hinge on the composition of state supreme courts, which play a crucial role in blessing or rejecting voter suppression. Lawsuits are constantly filed in state courts challenging election law and practices, anything from voting procedures and gerrymandered maps to legislation restricting access to mail ballots. A change in the court’s membership can lead to major changes in election law, as in North Carolina this year. And some supreme courts are tasked with more direct roles in the running of elections, like supervising the drawing of new maps or participating in the certification of election results.

For more information, explore our state-by-state guide to how each state’s high court.

The post Everything You Always Wanted to Know About State Supreme Courts appeared first on Bolts.

Patricia McCullough, a Pennsylvania appeals court judge, issued an order in late November to halt certification of the state’s elections. It was a rare bright spot for Trump’s “Stop the Steal” crusade and its false claims of electoral impropriety, but his victory was short-lived. Within days, Pennsylvania’s supreme court unanimously reversed her ruling and shut down the case by dismissing it with prejudice.

The case, the justices ruled, offered an “extraordinary proposition that the court disenfranchise all 6.9 million Pennsylvanians who voted in the General Election.” The state supreme court has since repeatedly reversed McCullough in other election cases, including overturning a ruling she joined last year against the state’s expanded mail-in voting rules, and rejecting her advice that the state adopt a Republican-drawn redistricting proposal. 

McCullough is now running to join the court that so directly questioned her judgment. The death of Democratic Chief Justice Max Baer in October has left a vacancy that voters will fill this year. The winner will join this swing state’s high court and hear cases that touch the 2024 election, just as Trump vies to be on the ballot once more. 

In the run-up to Tuesday’s Republican primary, McCullough has enjoyed financial support from “Friends of Doug Mastriano,” a political committee that supports Mastriano, the prominent election denier and Trump ally who unsuccessfully ran for governor last year on an agenda of disrupting state elections.

The primary pits McCullough against Carolyn Carluccio, a local judge endorsed by the state’s Republican Party who has also echoed some false claims of election impropriety. Two Democrats, Deborah Kunselman and Daniel McCaffrey, face off in a primary on the other side of the aisle, with a general election scheduled for November.

Dan Fee, a political consultant who works with liberal judge candidates in Pennsylvania, though he is not affiliated with any in this election, says McCullough siding with Trump didn’t surprise those who’ve followed her rulings over the years. 

“Republican judges across the country stood up and said, ‘This isn’t right.’ If you’re the judge who said that this passes the smell test, that raises real questions,” Fee said, calling McCullough a “national outlier of Republicans across the country.”

Judges of all political stripes rejected Trump’s claims in late 2020. The Washington Post tallied at least 38 Republican-appointed judges had ruled against Trump in the five weeks following the 2020 election. That included a Trump nominee in federal court who called a lawsuit to overturn Wisconsin’s results “extraordinary,” and the supreme court in Arizona, which is filled entirely with justices appointed by Republican governors.

“It’s almost hard to overstate how clownish these cases were and how poorly they were litigated,” attorney Sarah Gonski, who argued in favor of the Democratic Party in several Arizona cases in 2020, told Bolts. “The judges that heard our cases in Arizona were routinely Republicans. Every single one of those judges except for [McCullough] said, ‘Get out of my courtroom.’ It was definitely surprising.”

McCullough, in fact, has embraced that distinction. She said in 2021, “I was the only judge in the entire country to enter an order to halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election results.”

She made that comment during her first run for state supreme court, in 2021, just months after trying to block certification. She lost by 19 percentage points to now-Justice Kevin Brobson in the GOP primary. During that campaign, she boasted about her relationship with Trump: “I am the only candidate I know that had a tweet from President Donald Trump, and Donald Trump actually tweeted that I was a brilliant woman of courage,” she told Pittsburgh’s CBS station, in apparent reference to a post by Trump on Nov. 26, 2020.  (Trump did score some other small legal victories in late 2020, but other judges did not agree to halt certification.)

Neither McCullough nor her primary opponent, Carluccio, responded to requests for comment on this story.

Carluccio has also signaled comfort with voting restrictions and election conspiracies.

Asked by The Philadelphia Inquirer whether she believes election results in 2020 and 2022 were “free and fair,” she dodged the question. “If even one Pennsylvanian has concerns about our electoral process, we must address them,” she said. “Our government cannot simply dismiss the concerns of a large portion of our electorate.”

The Inquirer’s question came on the heels of Carluccio telling a local GOP audience that she opposed Act 77, the 2019 bipartisan law that expanded mail-in voting in the state; she claimed it had led to “hanky panky,” echoing Trump’s false allegations that mail-in voting has led to voter fraud.

Act 77 was already at the core of the 2020 case in which Trump allies sued to halt certification, as they sought to invalidate the mail-in ballots cast in the state thanks to the expanded statute. In reversing McCullough’s order in favor of the plaintiffs, the state supreme court cited the “complete failure to act with due diligence” since Act 77 had passed a year before. More than a year later, in early 2022, McCullough again sided with Republicans in another case they brought against Act 77, striking down the law as unconstitutional in a 3-2 ruling. The supreme court upheld Act 77 in August. 

Other elections on Tuesday feature candidates who have aligned with Trump’s Big Lie. In Kentucky, the Republican secretary of state is running for re-election against an election denier who has the backing of Mike Lindell. In Pennsylvania, VoteBeat and Spotlight PA identified dozens of local candidates who have amplified false claims about the 2020 election in places like Washington County.

The shadow of “Stop the Steal” efforts also loomed large in 2023’s only other supreme court race, in which liberals flipped control of Wisconsin’s high court in April. That election saw more than $31 million spent, a national record for a judicial race. Bloomberg reports that the four Pennsylvania candidates have combined to spend less than $1 million so far, though spending could intensify in the six months before Nov. 7.

Unlike in Wisconsin, the court majority is not in question in Pennsylvania this year. 

With one seat on the bench now empty, Democrats hold a 4-2 majority, and November’s victor will fill the seventh seat.

This election could open the door, however, to Republicans regaining court control in Pennsylvania in the future. The terms of three of Pennsylvania’s Democratic supreme court justices end in 2025; if they seek another term, they would face an up-or-down retention election. One Democratic justice, Christine Donahue, is set to hit the mandatory retirement age in 2027, which will prompt a vacancy. Should Republicans win this year, it may help them flip the majority later in the decade.

In the near term, Pennsylvania is likely to remain at the epicenter of election-related litigation, and the state supreme court will continue to be central to resolving that litigation.

“Anyone who remembers 2020 and is thinking ahead to 2024 knows that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is going to play a critical role in how the state runs its elections and how the outcome of the election is managed and dealt with,” Victoria Bassetti, senior advisor at the nonpartisan States United Democracy Center, which works to protect ballot access and beat back voter suppression, told Bolts. 

She added, “No one should ever, ever be complacent or overconfident about how courts will rule in these cases, which means that every election and every judge who’s elected to that bench is important.” 

The post The ‘Stop the Steal’ Judge Who Wants a Seat on Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court appeared first on Bolts.

In the church vestibule, someone had put out free “Justice 4 Wisconsin” spice packets from the outspokenly progressive spice company Penzeys, which is headquartered in the Milwaukee area and has trademarked the phrase “Season liberally.” “Wisconsin’s Republicans lie and cheat, and when we stay silent they win,” says the messaging on the packet. “Speak out for Justice, our environment, a fair playing field for all, and the importance of voting April 4.”

The event itself was nonpartisan and the candidates’ names were barely mentioned. Instead, the panelists discussed how they grapple with getting out the vote in underserved Milwaukee communities that are struggling with gun violence, underfunded schools, and food deserts.

They lamented the challenges of organizing in Milwaukee given some state conservatives’ undisguised hostility toward the voters of color who make up the majority of the city’s population. Most recently, a GOP member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission bragged to other Republicans in a January email about a successful voter-suppression campaign “in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas” of Milwaukee; the commissioner, Bob Spindell, refused calls to step down and has not been disciplined.

“There’s so many needs pressing our community today. When we talk about disparities in this country, Milwaukee leads the nation,” said panelist Sharlen Moore, who co-founded the local youth leadership program Urban Underground in 2000. To energize voters, “we got to get back to the block” and build community with neighbors.

Another panelist, 20-year-old activist Deisy España, shared a message that she said resonates with her peers, many of whom—like España—have immigrant parents who cannot vote. “I tell them they’re voting for their parents,” she said.

After the town hall, attendee Deborah Thompson told Bolts that in her neighborhood of Heritage Heights, a small middle-class, majority-Black community about six miles northwest of the church, she is talking with her family, friends and Bible study group about voting on April 4.

“Democracy is a big concern of mine because I do see it as under threat,” said Thompson, who is 75. To encourage people to vote, she first brings up the erosion of voting rights and the loss of ballot drop boxes, which the state supreme court disallowed last year in a 4-3 ruling. 

“If I feel safe enough, then I’ll bring up women’s rights,” she added.

Tuesday’s election will settle if conservatives keep a majority on Wisconsin’s supreme court or if it flips to the left, and all of those issues hang in the balance. Amid an outpouring of national attention and spending, the urgent questions the race will decide have dominated the campaign and its coverage. Will the state’s abortion ban from 1849 survive a legal challenge, will Wisconsin end up with fairer electoral maps for the rest of the decade, will voters regain access to drop boxes? For people who are volunteering their time on this race, these stakes are as enormous as they are self-evident.

But they also face a difficult reality. This momentous showdown is taking place in an off-year, springtime, low-turnout election, far from the energy that greets a presidential race.

Mobilizing people to come out in elections that aren’t synced with national cycles is always a challenge, and there’ve been efforts across the country to move their time. “Historically these spring elections have extremely low turnouts. This election is going to be all about who gets the people out to vote,” Christine Sinicki, a Democratic Assembly member who represents the southernmost parts of Milwaukee and some adjacent suburbs along Lake Michigan, told Bolts. 

Roughly 960,000 people statewide cast ballots in the first round in February that decided which two judicial candidates would move on to next week’s general election. That’s a huge drop from November 2020, when nearly 3.3 million Wisconsinites voted for president. It’s an especially pressing headache for liberals: The drop-off is far more prevalent in Milwaukee, an engine of Democratic politics, than in the outer ring of conservative suburbs that power Wisconsin’s GOP candidates.

As a share of all registered voters, turnout in February was 26 percent in Milwaukee County and 33 percent in the WOW counties. Within just the city of Milwaukee, it reached only 22 percent.

In Wisconsin’s nail-biters, these shifts can make all the difference. And now, control of the state’s supreme court hinges in part on whether organizers in Milwaukee persuade and help enough city residents to vote.

Restrictions that have been blessed by that same court, like the ban on drop boxes, have not helped. A Republican law adopted in 2018 also cut back early voting in Milwaukee from nearly six weeks to two weeks before an election. That makes it harder for working families in Milwaukee to find time to vote, Sinicki said. “There’s a lot of people out there working two jobs who just can’t get there on Election Day.”

Even within the city of Milwaukee, turnout is not spread evenly. According to an analysis by Marquette University researcher John Johnson, Milwaukee’s overall voter turnout in recent years has declined, with the biggest losses in low-income and predominantly Black and Latinx areas. That pattern held in the first round in February: Turnout varied wildly, from roughly 5 percent of registered voters in some wards to roughly ten times that rate in more affluent neighborhoods.

In the ward that contains St. Gabriel Church of God in Christ, turnout reached only 12 percent in February—down very precipitously from where it stood in the November midterms, 51 percent.

LaToya White, another panelist in the town hall, pointed to the disparities felt by residents on the north side of Milwaukee, especially younger people. “Being an organizer, you’re in the community every day, and you see our youth,” she said. “They feel like they’re left out.”

White works at Wisconsin Voices, a community organization that promotes civic participation; she saw “amazing” engagement here last fall but this has not carried into the judicial race. “This election is so quiet,” she said. “A supreme court race to them, they don’t see how important this is and don’t know that this election here is one of the most important out of the next ten years.”

In a race where so much is at stake, organizers and party representatives aren’t sticking to one issue to energize voters.

“A lot of people until recently I don’t think understood the importance of the supreme court and how important it was to our day-to-day lives and our rights,” Sinicki said. “People are finally waking up. I always said we have to hit rock bottom before people realize what’s going on here, and I think we’re there. If they can strip away our rights to control our own healthcare, what’s next?”

A lawsuit against the state’s abortion ban is working its way through state courts, and Janet Protasiewicz, the liberal candidate in the race, has campaigned on her personal support for abortion rights. Last week, in her only public debate with her conservative opponent Daniel Kelly, Protasiewicz said, “If my opponent is elected, I can tell you with 100 percent certainty, that 1849 abortion ban will stay on the books.” 

For reproductive rights advocates, anger over the ban is tied in with concerns about democracy in Wisconsin. There is no plausible path for Democrats to overturn it legislatively because Republicans have maintained ironclad control over Wisconsin’s legislature thanks to the heavily gerrymandered electoral maps they have drawn. The maps are widely considered some of the most skewed in the country. Sam Munger, an election consultant and panelist at the town hall, said the maps have “rendered voting largely irrelevant.”

But the supreme court election is a statewide race, so it offers Wisconsinites the opportunity to vote outside the confines of those gerrymanders. Protasiewicz has called the state maps “rigged” and many Democrats hope that a liberal court could strike them down. 

Protasiewicz’s supporters talk up the election’s implications for the future of voting rights. The Democratic Party of Wisconsin held a “Voting Rights Panel” in mid-March on Milwaukee’s north side to address issues of gerrymandering and voter suppression, in the presence of prominent Democrats like former Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, who lost the U.S. Senate race last fall.

Conservatives are mobilizing around the same issues. Wisconsin’s leading anti-abortion groups have rallied around Kelly. 

Scott Presler, a young, pro-Trump conservative from Virginia and founder of the Super PAC Early Vote Action, has spent the last couple of weeks in Wisconsin, door-knocking and making appearances to get out the Republican vote for Kelly, with the long-term goal of advancing what he calls “election integrity” in swing states to ensure a win for Trump in 2024. On a March 16 episode of Steve Bannon’s War Room show, Presler called the April 4 election “one of the most consequential elections in Wisconsin history” because of the state supreme court’s control over voter access issues like ID and proof-of-residency requirements.

“If the liberals are able to win on April 4, we will have unmanned drop boxes in Milwaukee and Madison going into the 2024 election,” he warned. The morning after the first day of early voting last week, Presler took to Twitter to celebrate strong turnout numbers in conservative Waukesha County and to call on people to vote in a string of counties that did not include Madison and Milwaukee.

Other Republicans are also treating Milwaukee, where Protasiewicz serves as a local judge, as a foil for the rest of the state. That’s a frequent campaign tactic for the GOP in Wisconsin. Some are already floating impeaching her over her work as a Milwaukee judge if she wins. (On the same day as the supreme court race, a special election for a state Senate seat will decide if the GOP has the Senate supermajority it would need to remove a state official on a party-line vote.)

The judicial race is ostensibly nonpartisan but Democratic groups are backing Protasiewicz and Republican groups are supporting Kelly, a lawyer who used to sit on the state supreme court and has a long history in conservative politics.

Money has poured into the race, reflecting national interest but also lax campaign finance rules that allow for massive expenditures. Total spending in the supreme court race is already near $45 million with a week to go, according to WisPolitics, which triples the national record for a judicial election.

That includes at least $15 million in independent spending since Jan. 1, according to the Wisconsin Ethics Commission. Groups supporting Protasiewicz have a slight edge in spending as of publication, but far more of the money on the liberal side has gone directly into the candidate’s campaign coffers. Billionaires George Soros and J.B. Pritzker, the Illinois governor, are among the largest liberal donors, while conservatives include megadonors Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein and Federalist Society co-chairman Leonard Leo. People and groups with ties to the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election have also donated millions to help Kelly. 

But as the panelists of the St. Gabriel Church town hall attested, that noise isn’t heard equally in all parts of the state. 

After the March 18 town hall, a few groups of volunteers left to canvass nearby. They handed out nonpartisan fliers that listed general election and early voting information.

Milwaukee resident Jodi Delfosse, 55, took a stack of fliers and walked up and down a nearby block knocking on doors. It was a finger-numbing 16 degrees and the weather switched disorientingly between blizzard-like snow and clear sunshine every few minutes. She was met mostly by Ring security systems, with residents answering the door through their intercom, and a few face-to-face interactions. In a friendly voice, one resident told her through a closed door to leave the flier outside because “I’m not dressed.”

These obstacles to reaching voters door-to-door was one reason Linea Sundstrom started Supermarket Legends, a nonpartisan Milwaukee voter advocacy group that is run exclusively by volunteers, mostly retirees. They pass out informational literature and register voters outside local supermarkets and food pantries, at bus stops, on college campuses and on public sidewalks or outside any business that gives them permission.

“Everybody has to eat, and what we’re trying to do is go where people are instead of expecting them to come to us,” she told Bolts. The group’s flier for the supreme court race does not advocate for a candidate but identifies issues with a series of questions, such as “Is the 1849 abortion ban right for Wisconsin today?” and “What regulations are right for tap water?”

Supermarket Legends focuses on low-turnout areas and wherever “people don’t have a lot of resources,” Sundstrom said. They pay attention to where other groups are working and “try to fill in the gaps.” Right now, she said, the biggest gap is on the near-south side, a predominantly Latinx area where voter turnout outside of major elections is typically very low. 

Sundstrom described her group’s work in a ward where only 29 people voted in February, which is only 6 percent of registered voters. “One person standing in front of El Rey Supermarket on the south side can talk to 60, 70 people an hour, face to face,” Sundstrom said. 

Sylvia Ortiz-Velez is a Democratic lawmaker who represents the Wisconsin Assembly district with the highest share of Latinx residents in Wisconsin. Two weeks out from the runoff, she was canvassing her constituents in Milwaukee’s Polonia neighborhood, which is located about three miles south of the El Rey supermarket. Voter turnout is reliably higher in this neighborhood—26 percent in the primary—as is household income.

Going door to door is a way to reach the registered voters who regularly vote because they are the “lower-hanging fruit” of any get-out-the-vote campaign, she said. Plus “you learn a lot about what’s landing.”

At one house, the barrel-chested 64-year-old who opened his door to Ortiz-Velez already had his mind made up about the two candidates. “Get rid of ’em both. They’re wishy-washy. We need law and order,” he told her. He was wearing a National Latino Peace Officers Association T-shirt. He said Protasiewicz is too soft on crime, echoing GOP attacks. He called Kelly, who was paid by state Republicans to advise them in a covert scheme to overturn the 2020 election, “a crook.”

Then he added: “The one thing I like about (Protasiewicz) is giving women their rights.”

This comment surprised Ortiz-Velez. “In my district, abortion might come up, but it might not come up. It’s not something I would lead with,” she told Bolts. “Most of the people in our community make maybe $35,000 per year and work very hard for their families and they’ve always had to do a lot with less.” If she has time, she said she’ll “absolutely talk” with voters about gerrymandering, rigged district maps and voter access.

Here in Polonia, Ortiz-Velez made sure to mention that Protasiewicz is homegrown—she grew up on the south side, her parents are buried in a nearby cemetery and she attends a Catholic church about eight blocks away.

As she walked, she consulted a canvassing app on her phone called MiniVAN. It tells her the name, age and voting history of registered voters on the block. 

“Back in the day we put this all on index cards,” she said.

Ortiz-Velez has been canvassing in the district for over 20 years. Some things have not changed. “My father was an evangelist and he always told me, ‘Smile, smile, smile,’” she said outside one house while waiting for an answer at the door.

The post “This Election Is So Quiet”: Inside the Scramble to Mobilize Milwaukee in a High-Stakes Judge Race appeared first on Bolts.

Smith, an appointee of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, lost his re-election bid on Tuesday in Hillsborough County (Tampa). This blue-tilting region, long viewed as a national bellwether, was just stripped of its prosecutor by DeSantis over his defense of abortion.

After a campaign dominated by his decision in the January abortion case, Smith was ousted by Nancy Jacobs, a local attorney in private practice. Although the election was nonpartisan, vote breakdowns suggest that Smith drew support from GOP voters while Jacobs was backed by Democrats. 

The campaign broke the mold of Florida’s judicial elections, where the local establishment typically rallies to easily carry incumbents across the finish line. The editorial board of the Tampa Bay Times, which backed Joe Biden in 2020, endorsed Smith as well as the other sitting circuit court judge on the ballot this week, lauding Smith for the “respect he shows litigants in his court” even as it acknowledged issues in the abortion decision. (The other incumbent judge easily won.) Even the county’s elected chief public defender, Democrat Julianne Holt, endorsed Smith, though she ultimately pulled her support as the race became contentious in the final stretch.

Further south, in Miami-Dade County, James Bush, the only Democratic lawmaker who voted for Florida’s 15-week abortion ban, was ousted in a primary by challenger Ashley Gantt. Bush, who frequently sided with Republicans, was also the only Democrat who supported the recent law against discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in Florida classrooms.

These twin results speak to the shockwaves felt both within Democratic politics and the general electorate ever since the Supreme Court overturned federal protections for abortion in June. Also on Tuesday, Democrats unexpectedly held a congressional seat in an upstate New York district that Joe Biden narrowly carried two years ago, adding to a streak of overperformances for the party since Dobbs; some Democrats also pointed to abortion as a factor in their win over the district attorney of Tennessee’s Shelby County earlier this month. 

John Fox, a Tampa-based Democratic operative who runs a PAC called Progressive Youth that campaigned against Smith, said the results in Florida show abortion rights is motivating voters.

“Abortion is a huge issue,” Fox told Bolts. “Voters are seeking out information on it, and anytime you can link that to voters’ minds in a genuine way, I think it’s going to be a winning issue.”

But Fox also stressed that those links are often obscure when it comes to the role of local officials, despite the mountain of races where abortion is on the line this year. Fox said he first made the connection to Smith’s race when he read about the judge’s January decision, but said it was hard for him to convince people to pay attention to such a downballot race. “These races are just so low information,” he told Bolts. “The chance that your life is going to be affected by a bad judge is significantly higher risk than a bad state House member or state Senator, and nobody really kind of knows what’s going on.”

Progessive Youth sent mailers to voters that hit Smith for ruling “based on his religious beliefs—not the law.” Another mailer sent by the same organization was specific to the Jane Doe case, stating, “Judge Jared Smith thinks women are too dumb to make their own bodily choices.”

Smith sought to save his job by rallying religious conservatives. “I’m a believer, I’m a judge and I’m a Christian,” he declared while campaigning in a church. Smith is also associated with a group that attacked Jacobs for having a “woke” agenda, Creative Loafing Tampa Bay reported earlier this month. 

“I think the only religion that belongs in the courtroom is the rule of law,” Jacobs told Bolts on Wednesday when asked about Smith’s comments.

But Smith’s record also testifies to the vast authority local officials already wielded over people’s access to abortion before Dobbs, let alone now. 

Smith’s decision in the January case was overturned by an appeals court that ruled he had abused his discretion in holding that “Jane Doe” was too immature to be granted a waiver from parental notification laws. But the very fact that he heard the teenager’s plea stems from restrictions Florida adopted that empower local judges to arbitrarily bestow reproductive rights upon specific teenagers, in a process known as “judicial bypass.” An investigation published by Mother Jones in 2014 documented how conservative laws combine with local anti-abortion judges in Florida to close the door for hundreds of minors every year. 

Jacobs would not comment to Bolts on Smith’s decision in January beyond pointing to the appeals court ruling that faulted his reasoning. She also stressed that she would apply Florida’s laws on abortion regardless of what they may be. 

Florida has not banned abortion at the moment, and for now a state supreme court precedent bars such a ban, but the state is currently implementing a 15-week ban, and the conservative supreme court could revisit its precedent. The state also has plenty of restrictions like a parental notification mandate that led to Smith’s decision in January.

Smith’s defeat also comes just weeks after DeSantis suspended the Democratic prosecutor Hillsborough County voters elected in 2016 and 2020, Andrew Warren, and replaced him with a conservative ally, Susan Lopez, who has promptly rolled back reforms put in place by her predecessor. In justifying his decision, which Warren is now challenging in court, DeSantis pointed to Warren’s public statement that he would not prosecute abortion cases. 

In ousting Smith, whom DeSantis appointed to his circuit court seat in 2019, Hillsborough voters signaled their distaste for the anti-abortion policies that the governor is only escalating. 

But DeSantis was more successful in other primaries on Tuesday in his quest to  reshape the state to his liking. DeSantis pushed to move local school boards to the right, endorsing and campaigning for candidates who express alarm about discussions of racism and the rights of LGBTQ students. Most of the candidates he endorsed across the state prevailing on Tuesday, including two in Miami-Dade, the state’s most populous county. Two of three school board candidates he endorsed in Hillsborough County also won.

A rare DeSantis failure in those school board races occurred in Alachua County (Gainesville), where  the governor had also ousted an elected official out under controversial circumstances. Diyonne McGraw, a former school board member who was removed from her position by the governor over objections to her residency in 2021 (those objections are no longer operative, according to The Alligator), won her old seat back, beating the conservative school board member the governor had appointed to replace her. 

In November, DeSantis will face Charlie Crist, a former Republican governor turned Democratic member of Congress. Crist, who supports abortion rights, cinched the Democratic nomination for governor on Tuesday. November will also decide control of the state legislature, an attorney general race that pits a Republican incumbent against  a former Democratic prosecutor who was herself targeted by a GOP governor over her reform stance, as well as the retention of five of the seven justices on Florida’s conservative Supreme Court.

Hundreds of thousands of Floridians will be barred from voting in those elections as a result of Florida’s extremely harsh felony disenfranchisement rules, including if they are too poor to pay off their court debt. DeSantis announced last week that a new elections police force set up this year was indicting people who erroneously registered to vote local Republicans in the state have already been prosecuting people for months for registering when they owed court debt, even though the state does not provide information to voters regarding their eligibility. 

Still, Fox is urging Floridians to pay attention and engage with local elections, like races for judge. “One of the lessons that people learned ever since 2016 is sometimes you just gotta—nobody is coming to the rescue,” he said. “If you see something and it bothers you, sometimes you just got to do it.”

The post Voters Oust Florida Judge Who Denied Teenager’s Abortion Request Because of Bad Grades appeared first on Bolts.