After every judicial election someone makes this obvious point: it’s time to rotate ballot position from ward to ward. Picking a number out of a can should not determine who sits on the bench or who is elected to City Council or the General Assembly.
The only unendorsed candidates who managed to win yesterday had the first or second ballot position. Some of them were also very well qualifed candidates who had other sources of support, such as Diane Thompson, and they might have won anyway. But some will be on the bench primarily because of ballot position.
One endorsed candidate who deserves to be on the bench, Joyce Eubanks, had the worst conceivable ballot position. A few voters came out of the polls yesterday and told me that they “could not find her.”
So you would think that now that the party has shown it’s ability to hang together in judicial races–which is on balance, more of a good than a bad thing–someone would try to get the General Assembly to move quickly on this.
I presume we need a state law to do this although I may be wrong and City Council could do it.