by Albert J. Klumpp
Official results and ward/township breakdowns are still weeks away. But with an unexpected free day, I crunched through the available unofficial vote totals to provide FWIW with my usual analysis of Cook County’s judicial retention voting in this month’s election.
Nationally, it was another good year for retention candidates. A total of 704 state court judges sought retention in noncompetitive votes in seventeen U.S. states, including 29 supreme court justices and 78 intermediate appellate justices. Pending some unreported results in Kansas, it appears that 702 of the candidates were retained.
Besides Shannon O’Malley in Cook County, the only other removal occurred in Oklahoma. Three supreme court justices who were appointed by Democratic governors came under attack by a right-wing organization funded by large amounts of dark money and apparently with the implicit support of the state’s Republican governor. One justice was narrowly removed and the others were narrowly retained.
Here at home, voter turnout based on numbers reported so far was 66.1 percent countywide. This was the lowest turnout for a presidential election since 1996. Voters were presented with the longest judicial retention ballot in the county’s history: 78 names, nosing out the 77-name 2000 ballot. As for what those voters did with it:
In the aggregate, an estimated 22.1 percent of the retention electorate used some source of information in their voting. This compares with estimates of 32.8 percent in 2018, 31.9 percent in 2020, and 22.2 percent in 2022. The noticeable change in 2022 and its recurrence this month is definitely the most significant aspect of the two elections, and deserves a closer look.
- Participation on the retention ballot, based on the median number of votes cast for circuit court judges, was 68.6 percent. While higher than the county’s long-term average, the figure is lower than in the last three elections, and likely indicates that the surge of voter interest that peaked participation in 2018 and 2020 will return to a more long-term typical level, as it did after the Operation Greylord years and as is typical for surge events in retention jurisdictions.
- The baseline approval rate across the entire group of judges was 74.1 percent, marginally lower than the 75.7 percent average for the previous ten elections.
- Female names saw an advantage of 2.0 percentage points relative to male names. Irish names and for Black names (based on U.S. Census data) saw advantages of 1.3 and 2.1 points, respectively. There was no statistically detectable advantage for Hispanic names, which has been typical in Cook County in recent years.
- The combined effect of ratings from all of the local bar associations appears to have been roughly 13.9 percentage points. Splitting this estimate up among the different bars is unusually difficult for this election, but there are indications that the smaller bars beyond the CBA, ISBA and CCL had more of an impact than in any previous election.
- As for the newer, more politically oriented information sources: The Girl I Guess guide captured an estimated 4.8 percent of the vote, while the information printed in the Chicago Votes! young voters guide captured an estimated 3.3 percent. The latter is of particular interest, because it simply flagged every judge who had been flagged by Injustice Watch in its own voter guide—which does not provide vote recommendations—based on “a negative review or…negative controversy.” To the extent that this represents the most likely decision strategy for a voter using only the Injustice Watch guide, then the Chicago Votes! measurement also includes the direct impact of the Injustice Watch guide (as opposed to its indirect impact on other sources).
Historically it was always the suburbs that led the city in information use. For instance, in 1988, a presidential year and the peak year of electoral interest in Operation Greylord, more than 61 percent of the roughly 234,000 voters who used newspaper or bar ratings in their voting were suburban voters. This year, however, in a similar election—presidential year, higher-than-normal interest—more than 63 percent of the roughly 315,000 information-using voters were city voters.
What explains this sudden change? Three related factors. One, the county’s major print media (Tribune, Sun-Times, suburban Daily Herald), which always an impacted the suburbs more than the city, offered almost nothing to voters in either election after many years of providing their own recommendations, or bar ratings, or both. (The only exception was more than 3200 words of commentary in the November 3 Chicago Tribune covering every individual judge, but with nothing to distill all of that verbiage down to simple vote recommendations.)
Two, information about retention candidates has become more complicated. My research on judicial voting has consistently found that when it comes to voter information, simplicity is fundamentally important, and that the more complicated information becomes, the less likely voters are to use it. Complexity was particularly noticeable this year in testing various likely word combinations of Google searches on mobile devices. That is, searches that suburban voters would be likely to run in order to replace newspaper guidance. Two years ago, relatively simple pages from bar associations came up as top search results. This year, those pages were pushed farther down by more complicated sites from media outlets such as WTTW and WMAQ, pages that attempted to present larger volumes of information with far less clarity.
And third, the new information sources that have emerged in recent cycles have remained consistent compared to newspapers, and at least so far have found and maintained audiences. These audiences have consistently been 70 percent or more city voters.
The bottom line of all this, and the reason why this development is so important: if information use in the suburbs on November 5 had matched that of the city, as many as 100,000 votes would have been affected and the number of removals would have been at least three, and possibly four or five, instead of one.
When official ward and township numbers are released, we’ll be able to explore this in more detail. For now I’ll just add the usual disclaimer that the estimates cited above are just that—estimates—with margins of error. But all are considered statistically significant, and most very highly so.
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