How to Research Judicial Candidates on Your Ballot

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Scroll far enough down almost any American ballot and you hit a stretch of names you have never seen, attached to offices you cannot quite picture, with no party label to grab onto. Judge of the Superior Court. Associate Justice. Retain: yes or no.

Plenty of people stop there and hand the ballot in.

That instinct is understandable, and it is also a problem, because these are the officials who decide how the law lands: on your lease, your custody case, your speeding ticket, the ballot rules in your county. The good news is that researching them is more doable than it looks. The trick is knowing that the right method depends entirely on how your state fills its courts, and knowing which handful of nonpartisan sources were built for exactly this moment.

Here is the short version. Find out whether your judges run in partisan races, nonpartisan races, or yes-or-no retention votes. Then go to your official voter guide, your state’s judicial performance evaluation report if it has one, and a nonpartisan database like Ballotpedia. You can start with Ballotpedia’s judicial elections hub, linked later in this piece, to compile a candidate’s biography, rulings, and endorsements in one place.

Read those before you read a single campaign ad. The rest of this piece walks that process step by step.

Why the Judicial Section Feels Like a Wall

Start with the scale of the thing. A 2026 Brennan Center for Justice analysis found that 38 states use some form of election when choosing their state high court justices, and roughly 39 states elect judges at some level of their court system. Most voters, in other words, live somewhere that puts at least a few judges on the ballot.

And these are not sleepy races anymore. In the 2023 to 2024 cycle, at least $157.3 million was spent on state supreme court elections, 35 percent more than the previous cycle, according to a Brennan Center summary.

Something new happened in that cycle, too. Interest groups outspent the candidates themselves for the first time, laying out $85 million against the candidates’ $70 million, per the same Brennan Center analysis. Groups backing liberal candidates spent $55 million; groups backing conservative candidates spent $30 million.

So the money is loud. The voter, meanwhile, is often quiet.

A paper by political scientist Matthew Thornburg and coauthors, prepared for an election science research conference, examined ballot roll-off in states that offer straight party voting, the option to select every candidate from one party with a single mark.

A one-mark shortcut carries you through the partisan races and then dumps you, unassisted, at the exact spot where the labels disappear.

That is the heart of the confusion. Most judicial elections strip away the two cues voters lean on hardest: the party label and the saturation news coverage. What is left is a name and, sometimes, a job title.

The confusion is real, and it is not your fault. This blankness is baked into how these offices are designed.

Step One: Figure Out How Your State Picks Judges

Before you research a single candidate, answer one question about your state: how do these judges get their jobs? The answer tells you what information even exists to find.

Ballotpedia sorts judicial elections into three main formats. In a partisan election, judges are elected by the people and appear on the ballot with a party label. In a nonpartisan election, they are elected by the people but with no party label. In a retention election, voters get a periodic yes-or-no question about whether an incumbent judge should stay on for another term, and the judge runs unopposed.

Each format changes the research job completely.

A partisan race hands you a party cue and usually a real campaign, complete with fundraising reports and ads to scrutinize. A nonpartisan race takes the party cue away and forces you toward biographies, endorsements, and ratings. A retention election has no opponent at all, which sounds easy until you realize there is nothing to compare the judge against except their own record.

The wrinkle is that most states mix these methods across court levels. The Brennan Center’s tally shows that among the 38 states using elections for their high courts, 8 use contested partisan elections, 14 use contested nonpartisan elections, and 19 use retention elections, categories that overlap since retention states often fill first terms by appointment or election. New Mexico runs a hybrid that stacks appointment, a partisan election, and later retention.

Go down to the trial courts and the picture shifts again. The same Brennan Center research reports that of the 32 states electing trial judges, 21 use nonpartisan elections and the rest use partisan ones. Facing a partisan primary for one court and a bare retention question for another on the same ballot is entirely normal.

The table below is your orientation map. Find your state’s high court method, and it tells you which tools in the next section matter most.

Source: Brennan Center for Justice and Ballotpedia. New Mexico appears in the partisan group but uses a hybrid of appointment, partisan election, and retention.

One more structural detail worth knowing, because it explains why so many “elected” judges first reach the bench without an election. Most states use gubernatorial appointment to fill judicial vacancies that open mid-term, and in the states selecting high court judges through contested elections, those interim seats are generally filled by non-elective processes.

In practice: the judge you are asked to retain may have been appointed, then vetted by a commission, long before you ever saw the name.

That vetting trail is something you can read.

Where the Nonpartisan Information Actually Lives

Now the part you came for. When there is no party label and no news coverage, where do you go?

Your first stop is the official voter guide. Many states mail one or post it online through the secretary of state. These guides are produced by election officials, not campaigns, and they often carry candidate-written statements plus the plain mechanics of what each office does.

The most underused source is your state’s judicial performance evaluation.

17 states and several territories run judicial performance evaluation commissions. These bodies survey the lawyers, jurors, court staff, and litigants who appeared before a judge, then rate that judge on things like legal knowledge, impartiality, communication, and temperament.

If you live in one of those states, this is close to a cheat code, especially for retention elections where there is no opponent to compare against.

Your third stop is bar association ratings. Lawyers’ groups evaluate candidates and often rate them “qualified,” “well qualified,” or “not qualified.” The American Bar Association keeps a hub on judicial performance evaluation resources, and many local and state bars run their own reviews.

Finally, a nonpartisan database ties it together. Sites like Ballotpedia compile candidate biographies, prior rulings, endorsements, and campaign finance in one place, which is often the fastest way to build a profile of a trial judge that local news never covered.

Read those four sources first. That sequence, official guide, performance evaluation, bar ratings, nonpartisan database, is the whole method. Everything else is interpretation.

Reading a Judge’s Record Without a Law Degree

You do not need to parse case law to evaluate a judge. You need to know what the nonpartisan sources are measuring and how to weight it.

Performance evaluations are built around conduct, not ideology. They ask whether a judge is prepared, treats people fairly, explains decisions clearly, and keeps a courtroom running. That framing is deliberate: it lets you assess whether someone does the job well without demanding that you agree with every ruling they have ever made.

Bar ratings work similarly, screening for competence and integrity rather than which way a judge leans.

So when you see a “not qualified,” treat it as a flare. It usually reflects concerns that the people inside the courthouse flagged something serious.

Endorsements deserve a second look, not a first one. A judge endorsed by a bar association’s evaluation committee is a different thing from a judge endorsed by a group with a direct stake in future cases. Note who is doing the endorsing before you let it move you.

Campaign finance rounds out the picture, and it is public. In partisan and nonpartisan races, candidates file disclosure reports; a nonpartisan database will often summarize them. You are not looking for a smoking gun so much as a pattern: who is funding this race, and do they have business before this court?

That question matters more than it used to. Consider the Wisconsin Supreme Court, where spending on the 2023 contest reached about $51 million and then surpassed $100 million in the 2025 race for the same court. When that much outside money floods a single court’s races, the disclosure reports stop being trivia and start being the story.

When the Ads Get There Before You Do

Here is the trap the money sets.

The Brennan Center’s long-running “New Politics of Judicial Elections” series has documented that television advertising in judicial races leans heavily on crime, sentencing, and a small number of high-profile rulings, especially when the ads come from outside interest groups, and that these spots frequently distort the underlying cases.

The favorite labels are compact and sticky: “soft on crime,” “anti-business.” Each one usually rests on a single decision, stripped of its facts, its record, and the law the judge was actually applying.

Think about what a judge’s job requires. A ruling that looks “soft on crime” in a fifteen-second spot might be a judge correctly applying a sentencing statute, or suppressing evidence from an unlawful search because the Constitution required it. The ad cannot tell you which, because telling you which would defeat the ad.

This is precisely why the sequence in the last two sections matters. If your first exposure to a candidate is a mailer, the mailer sets your frame, and everything you read afterward gets measured against it.

Flip the order. Read the performance evaluation and the bar rating first, form a baseline, and let the ads arrive second, where you can weigh them against something solid. An ad is evidence of what a campaign wants you to feel. It is not evidence of how a judge does the work.

What to Do When There Is Almost Nothing to Find

Not every voter gets a performance evaluation booklet. Trial court races in particular can be near-invisible, with candidates unknown outside legal circles and local media doing little more than printing the names.

So what do you do when the well is dry?

Start by widening the net beyond a single search. Check whether your county or regional bar association ran an evaluation even if the state did not; local bars often review trial judges that no one else touches. Look for a nonpartisan voter guide from a civic group in your area. Pull the candidate’s own materials, a campaign site or a filed statement, and read them for what they reveal about experience and priorities.

Ballotpedia’s judicial elections hub is again useful here, because it aggregates the scraps—prior positions, professional background, any endorsements on record—into one profile faster than you could assemble them yourself.

When you have exhausted the sources and still cannot form a judgment, you have a real choice to make, and it is worth making on purpose rather than by default.

Leaving a race blank is a legitimate decision; an undervote does not spoil the rest of your ballot. But recognize the trade. When large numbers of voters roll off, the outcome shifts toward the smaller, more organized set of people, often those closest to legal or partisan networks, who did vote.

The honest framing is this: a blank line is a decision to let others decide. Sometimes, with genuinely no information, that is the responsible call. Make that choice knowingly.

The Gap the Tools Cannot Close

There is a limit to all of this, and it is worth naming plainly.

The strongest tools cluster in the states that arguably need them least. 17 states and several territories run judicial performance evaluation commissions. The states with the fiercest, best-funded contested elections do not all offer an official report card to match.

That leaves a mismatch. The louder and more expensive a judicial race, the more a voter needs a neutral anchor, and the less likely a state-run evaluation is to be waiting for them.

The experience is universal enough to be measured and, apparently, too ordinary to record.

Which puts more weight on the infrastructure that does exist. Whether performance evaluation commissions expand into more states, whether bar groups keep publishing blunt “not qualified” findings, whether civic organizations keep filling the coverage gap for invisible trial races: that machinery is what stands between an informed judicial vote and a guess.

And with interest group money now outrunning the candidates themselves, the next few election cycles will test whether that quiet, unglamorous infrastructure can keep pace with the ad buys. Before your next ballot, it is worth finding out which of these tools your own state actually offers. The answer varies more than almost anything else in American elections, and it decides how much guessing you will have to do.

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