For the judges on my ballot, do I even have a choice?

Early voting begins on Saturday, which gives you some extra time to walk into a polling place and consider your most important vote: no not whether to choose fascism; I’m talking about the various judges of local Civil or State Supreme Courts. 

Well look, they may not be the ones who decide whether to finally begin a nuclear war, but in theory your vote carries a little more power for a local judge than it does for president, where everything comes down to how one girldad in Bethlehem, Penn., feels about tax cuts versus autonomy for the girl he’s a dad of. In theory, anyway, because despite the fact that judges are on the ballot across the city, many of those races are literally over the moment the ballots are printed, with exactly as many candidates as there are open judicial seats. 

Why is it always like this? Judicial candidates tend not to campaign, because they’re not supposed to be political figures in the traditional sense of having big opinions on issues. So the process of who winds up on your ballot is left to the whims and machinations of county political parties, where opaque internal politics prize loyalty to machine leadership over the pure public good. Here's a breakdown of how it got this way, and what you can do about it:

What that judge do?

First, a quick primer on what the judges you vote for actually do. Civil Court judges are responsible for presiding over civil lawsuits where damages are capped at $25,000. Think of your various Judges Judys and Mills Lanes, except real law things happen there as opposed to TV bullshit. These judges can either have borough-wide seats or are limited to judicial districts in specific parts of the five boroughs.

Supreme Court justices hear lawsuits where damages are uncapped and also sometimes preside over criminal cases. State Supreme Court is not where dramatic appeals are heard like on the federal level; here in New York, we call that place the Court of Appeals. Each borough in the city is a separate judicial district, and the number of judges in each district is set by state law.  

And finally Surrogate Court judges are in charge of cases involving estates and deeds. There’s one surrogate court judge in every county in New York, except for New York (Manhattan) and also Brooklyn, which each have  two. (Surprise: the answer for why there are two in the latter is corruption. Or deal-making, if you prefer a softer term).

Who can I vote for this year?

There are a whopping three competitive judicial elections in all of New York City this year, which is to say there are three races where there are more candidates than seats. One in southern Brooklyn and two in Queens as a whole.

Voters who live in the 5th Municipal Court District (Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, Dyker Heights, Sunset Park, Borough Park and Windsor Terrace) have three candidates for two seats on Civil Court, where the winners will serve ten-year terms. 

In Queens, every ballot will have two countywide judicial elections, one for Civil Court and one for the Supreme Court, where the winners will serve 14-year terms. 

So how did these clowns even get on my ballot?

Well here’s where it gets tricky, because judicial elections are basically mired in some of the deepest muck there is: full-time county political party muck.

In the case of civil court and surrogate judges, there’s an open primary process. But in order to free up judges or potential judges from giving the impression that they are motivated by anything more than the respect for the majesty of the law, as opposed to political opinions, these political candidates aren’t allowed to tell voters how they would rule on various matters, and sitting judges can’t get involved in political activities. As a result, civil and surrogate court judges are dependent on county machines to support them and do their political work, like getting petition signatures in order to appear on a ballot.

It’s even worse at the Supreme Court level, where, during every primary election, each Assembly district is responsible for voting for delegates to judicial nominating conventions, but only if there are actually more candidates for delegate than seats in an Assembly district. Those delegates then attend county party meetings where they vote on who to make the party’s official judicial nominees.

That system though is strictly controlled by county parties, who work hard to ensure that delegates both run unopposed and are party loyalists who will do what they say. In the event a few reform types sneak through, well, party bosses can always do things like threaten to beat up said pesky reformers like longtime Kings County Democratic fixture Frank Seddio did in 2022.

In any of the three types of judicial elections, county parties that don’t have their shit together enough to nominate a full slate of candidates are allowed to cross-endorse candidates who make it through their own party’s nominating process, something Brooklyn reform organization the New Kings Democrats charge is due to back-room deals between county Democratic and Republican party leaders. 

Is anyone trying to fix it?

It depends on how you define “fix.” 

If you mean working to keep a system of elected judges but attempting to make the process more transparent and less controlled by party bosses, then yes, some reform organizations are at it. New Kings Democrats have proposed a host of revisions to the process they’ve been pushing in an effort to update decades-old fixes the Kings County Democratic Party instituted in the ‘70s, which included forming a judicial screening panel that determines who the party endorses. The proposed changes would involve much more input on who makes up screening panels that rate candidates and public forums where judicial candidates can take questions. 

In Queens, the New Reformers, a similar group to NKD, have spent two consecutive elections demanding Queens County Democratic leaders actually post the resumes of judicial candidates they nominate, and that they explain the standard used to determine whether candidates are even qualified for the job. It’s not a far-fetched request, since local bar associations have deemed party-backed judicial candidates “not qualified” to be judges.

If by “fix” you mean, however, eliminating judicial elections altogether in favor of across-the-board appointments, you won’t find many people in New York City arguing for it. The Fund for Modern Courts, which describes itself as a non-partisan group concerned with reforming court administration in the city, has pushed for appointing all levels of judges since the organization was founded in 1955. In a 2007 case challenging the state law that allows primary elections for Supreme Court judges, New York City (under then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg) filed an amicus curiae brief arguing for an appointment system. But the system is otherwise pretty entrenched.

And keep in mind, an appointment system leaves plenty of people unhappy. The actual Supreme Court is a famous partisan battleground, as is the process for getting judges seated in hundreds of federal court placements. Closer to home, the state Court of Appeals wound up controlled by a conservative bloc of justices by 2022 despite the fact that Democratic governors had run the state for almost 20 years. That situation finally ended in 2023 when in a rare show of force and intraparty warfare, progressive Democratic lawmakers tanked Governor Kathy Hochul’s initial nominee for Chief Judge of the court, and voted in a second judge observers saw as more liberal than the one she was replacing.

Ultimately the screwy way that determines how judges get themselves on the ballot — and the power that party organizations have in that process because of how limited the candidates and sitting judges are in their ability to participate in politics — casts a kind of distortion field over the whole election process.

Candidates don’t have much in the way of websites or social media presences, though every now and again one will pop up with an extremely questionable Twitter account. All of which is to say your best bet in using your vote to judge those who might judge you is at the very least withhold a vote from someone who gets cross-endorsed by a party you can’t stand.

Who's on the ballot this year?

In the 5th Municipal Court District in Brooklyn, your choices on the ballot are: Hemalee Patel, running on the Democratic Party line; Benjamin Liebman, running on the Conservative Party line and Jacob Zelmanovitz, running on both the Democratic and Conservative Party lines.

For Queens County Civil Court your choices are: Glenda Hernandez, Sharifa Nasser-Cuellar, Amish Doshi, and Melissa Deberry on the Democratic Party line; Mary-Ann Maloney and Stephen Dachtera on the Republican Party line; William David Shanahan on both the Republican and Conservative/Common Sense Party lines and Peter F. Lane on both the Democratic and Republican Party lines.

For Queens Supreme Court your choices are: Delsia G. Marshall, Sandra M. Munoz, Lumarie Maldonado-Cruz, Andrea S. Ogle and John C. Katsanos on the Democratic Party line; Gary Muraca and Kathy Wu Parrino on the Republican and Conservative Party lines; and Alan J. Schiff and Claudia Lanzetta on the Democratic, Republican and Conservative Party lines.

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