Skip to main content

I Abstain: Why I Refuse to Vote in Judicial Retention Elections


Over a million Oklahomans voted in the recent November 3rd election. For most, the presidential race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is what drove them to the polls. However, some were likely confused when they reached the bottom portion of their ballot marked “Judicial Retention Elections.” What are judicial retention elections? Every two years, certain judges are placed on the ballot for a simple yes/no retention vote. These elections stem from Oklahoma’s judicial selection method, and ask voters whether they want to keep, or retain, certain judges. Elections are staggered so judges only face retention every six years.

Many claim that the merit selection method is a more sophisticated, apolitical judicial selection method than the federal model or the partisan election model, but in reality it is much worse than either of the two. In essence, the retention vote was a patronizing attempt to make “merit” selection more palatable to voters back in the 1960s. Unfortunately, due to a bribery scandal that involved a supreme court justice, it worked. Oklahomans voted to institute the so-called merit selection model. Predictably, not a single judge has been voted out via retention election in the fifty-plus years since they were instituted.

I would wager that the majority of Oklahoma voters, including me, a relatively informed voter, know next to nothing about the judges that come up for retention votes. That is not surprising, considering most people do not have the time to research and evaluate the legal philosophy and judicial track record of every judge. Thus, a look at election results from the past few elections tell a simple story: a majority simply vote yes on all of the judges, a decent minority vote no on all of them, while only a small fraction do research and make informed votes. To be clear, this is not a blog lambasting Oklahomans for being uninformed. Many people I know personally vote “No” on all retention elections no matter who it is. I used to vote “No” by default as well. The problem is, it doesn’t matter how informed you are. The judicial selection system we use is extremely flawed, thus rendering your vote meaningless.

Consider the following:

Option one: You vote “Yes” (as do a majority of Oklahomans) to retain all the judges (or justices) on the ballot. You maintain the status quo and have voted to validate the work of the Judicial Nominating Commission.

Option two: You vote “No” on all the judges/justices. If the majority of Oklahomans follow suit, what have you actually accomplished? The same institution (JNC) that gave you the lineup of presumably bad judges that you just voted out will simply reconvene, behind closed doors, and pick new ones. And there is not a singleinstitutional check to ensure that the commissioners choose the most qualified candidates.

Either way you vote, the JNC retains its grip on judicial selection in our state. To add insult to injury, the JNC is effectively controlled by lawyers from the Oklahoma Bar Association (OBA). The only interests truly represented on the court are those of the OBA. In simpler terms, lawyers effectively dictate who sits on the court regardless of retention election outcomes. The 1889 Institute has published various pieces regarding the JNC, the OBA, and the Supreme Court, but one point bears emphasizing again: aside from the useless and patronizing retention elections, the people of the state of Oklahoma have no say in who sits on the higher courts, while lawyers from the OBA have the ultimate say.

The only way to fix this issue is to wrest power away from the OBA by fundamentally reforming our judicial selection method. Voting in retention elections certainly won’t change anything.

I abstain.

Tyler Williamson is a Research Associate at 1889 institute and can be reached at twilliamson@1889institute.org.

The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of 1889 Institute. 

Popular posts from this blog

Welfare of Oklahoma’s Children Panned In Flawed “Study”

Are Oklahoma’s children underprivileged? According to a recently published list by Wallethub, which attempted to rank states with the most underprivileged children, Oklahoma is the 7th worst. However, if the goal was to help states improve their policies, or to show parents what states to avoid, the authors might have done better to provide sources for their data (outside the lists Wallethub had already compiled), and more importantly, choose better metrics. The authors don’t provide much context or support for why their chosen metrics matter, or how they could be changed. Of course, the goal might just be clicks.   The study is divided into three sections: Socio-economic welfare (50 points), health (25 points), and education (25 points). Each is evaluated based on Wallethub ’ s list of arbitrary metrics and then assigned a weighted score. These are then combined to get the final overall “ underprivileged” score. But are these scores worthwhile?   Socio-economic Welfare Share...
Read more

The Truth About COVID-19: Better Than You Think

As the media turns its attention back to COVID-19, there is a renewed push to shut down the economy. Some states have even begun to scale back reopening plans for their economies; others continue to delay opening. It is essential to look past their catastrophizing and focus on the facts of COVID-19. One fact to consider: while testing has risen 23%, the rate of positive results has only risen 1.3 percentage points to 6.2%. Even as alarmists point to the rise in cases, they still admit that the boost in testing has played a role in the rise in the total number of known cases. Therefore, the total number of positive cases is not of much use in this case, as it only paints a partial picture. The rate of increase in total positive cases is a more meaningful measure, and it has barely increased. Even more important is who is getting infected. The data show that recent cases are primarily younger people. But that’s a good thing; these are precisely the people that are key to building herd ...
Read more

How Biden/Harris and Well-educated Sophisticates Are Wrong in the Age of COVID-19

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris often declared during the campaign that “We believe in science.” And judging by the tendency of the college-educated , especially among the sophisticates living on the coasts, to agree with Harris’s positions on everything from climate change to proper precautions amid COVID-19, belief in “science” seems to many a mark of knowledge and wisdom. But is it? The modern belief in “science” increasingly appears to be a religion wherein the words of certain recognized experts are received with the reverence once reserved for the Pope. A college diploma almost serves as a permission slip to suspend one’s own judgment and reason in favor of taking the word of certain experts to heart, especially if they work in government, certain universities, or gain media credence.   This tendency to turn experts and the media into high priests of all knowledge is nothing new. In 1986, 60 Minutes ran a story about a phenomenon people experienced in cars with automatic...
Read more

Present Reforms to Keep the Ghost of State Questions Past from Creating Future Headaches

Oklahoma, like many western states, allows its citizens to directly participate in the democratic process through citizen initiatives and referendums. In a referendum, the legislature directs a question to the people — usually to modify the state constitution, since the legislature can change statutes itself. An initiative requires no legislative involvement, but is initiated by the people via signature gathering, and can be used to modify statute or amend the constitution. Collectively, the initiatives and referendums that make it onto the ballot are known as State Questions.   Recently, there have been calls to make it more difficult to amend the constitution. At least two proposals are being discussed. One would diversify the signature requirement by demanding that a proportional amount of signatures come from each region of the state. The other would require a sixty percent majority to adopt a constitutional amendment rather than the fifty percent plus one currently in place. ...
Read more