League of Women Voters of Illinois^®

Judicial Evaluation Commission for Illinois ~ Background

• There is a huge hole in Illinois' electoral process. Although we are one of 39 states that elect nearly all our judges, Illinois provides almost no way for the public to get reliable, nonpartisan information on the judges for whom we vote. As a result, the public votes less often for judges than for other candidates, and when the public does vote, they often base their choices on characteristics that have nothing to do with a candidate's quality.
  
  
• Many states have Judicial Evaluation Commissions which issue Judicial Performance Evaluations. While the evaluation procedures that these commissions utilize vary somewhat from state to state, they generally share certain things in common. First, they survey many different groups who interact and work with judges, including attorneys, jurors, litigants, witnesses, staff, and special groups who appear in front of judges, such as expert witnesses and social services. Second, while some evaluations consist only of surveys, others include court observation, interviews with the judges, public hearings and documentation from interested parties, reviews of opinions for Appellate judges, and other relevant factors such as caseload statistics.
  
  
• While 21 states and other entities (Washington, DC and Puerto Rico) already have such evaluation commissions, some, such as Illinois, conduct them entirely confidentially, utilizing them only for purposes of judges' self-improvement. Other states conduct some evaluations for confidential self-improvement and others, during an election cycle, for public consumption. Illinois' Supreme Court explicitly prohibits the sharing of results of the evaluation with the public.
  
  
• Without such evaluations, the public looks at any information available, including biased information. Voters are more vulnerable to biased, sensational media reports and partisan attacks on judges - some of whom have been voted out of office on the basis of unfair, partisan attacks - because there was no contradictory information available to the public.