Big money likely to enter judicial races

One of the more puzzling voting reforms passed this summer by the N.C. General Assembly dealt with an important part of elections that too few people care enough about – judicial races.

Outside of lawyers and professional political circles, we have our doubts about how many North Carolinians can name even one member of the N.C. Supreme Court. Just one.

That’s hardly the fault of voters. Judicial candidates face tough limits imposed by the N.C. Bar Association on what they can say before an election. That’s not a bad restriction. We all would have doubts, for example, about the supposed imparitality of a judge who made promises as a candidate to impose the toughest sentencing allowed whenever someone before him is convicted.

From 2004 through 2012, North Carolina used a simple set of rules for public financing of judicial races that has been called a model for the whole country. Instead of affording anonymous groups an opportunity to throw big dollars into campaign chests, the state gave candidates a different option. They could raise limited amounts of money from small, individual donors and thus qualify for as much as $250,000 in matching funds.

The system was a bipartisan success – all eight candidates for the N.C. Supreme Court abided by it in 2012.

Now, it’s gone.

Under the new rules, individual donors can give as much as $5,000 to judicial candidates and unlimited amounts of money to so-called independent organizations. The identities of even the biggest contributors to those organizations will not be disclosed.

Instead of electing judges based on their years of experience, we worry that big money will make Election Day decisions for us.

That’s a real shame for a bipartisan plan that was working just fine – and for the voters of North Carolina.