The Clinton-Obama cage match will be the lead story, of course, but voters in Ohio's March 4 Primary will also have the opportunity to vote for a number of judges. In Cleveland, as here in Cook County, a number of bar associations have collaborated on the evaluation of candidates for the Cuyahoga County bench. The Cleveland Plain Dealer ran a story about the bar evaluations in its February 12 editions.
Members of the judicial evaluation committees of our local bar associations may be interested in comparing their recent work to the Cleveland evaluations (found at Judge4Yourself.com).
If you check out the link, you'll note that the five cooperating bar associations use standard terms to describe their evaluations (Excellent, Good, Adequate, or Not Recommended) and corresponding point values (4, 3, 2 or 0). The opinion of any one bar association counts no more than any other: "Each organization's rating has been given equal weight in the averages and is not weighted by the number of members that the organization has." Candidates wind up with numerical evaluations: Some have 4.0's -- some have 0.0's -- and many fall somewhere in between.
I think this gives voters an impression of scientific precision -- which is probably not warranted. I submit that a person's "impartiality, integrity, temperament, diligence and professional competence" -- the factors that the Cuyahoga County lawyers are attempting to evaluate -- can not be easily or exactly reduced to simple integers.
On the other hand, the site links to biographical information on each candidate -- and has columns so voters can see who the newspapers endorsed.
4 weeks ago
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I don't know that most voters would see it as scientific precision. Sure, you can't really reduce all of those personal characteristics to a simple number--but we ask the electorate to reduce them to a single vote! A simplifying device like this one can be helpful to voters, provided it's constructed properly.
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