Election Time!
Nov. 7th, 2016 03:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogThere are dozens and dozens of judges up for retention in my voting area. There's no way to rationally be fully informed about all of them. I wish I could find a broader set of evaluations of judges by organizations that have goals other than simply evaluating their fitness. Evaluation based on their sentencing habits for drug offenses, for instance. But what I do have is a sample ballot from the Chicago Council of Lawyers with their recommendations for or against retention. I'll likely just go with that. You can access that sample ballot from their webpage.
They got it right in this past instance, mentioned in a Chicago Reader story! "The CCL evaluations have sometimes offended sitting judges, whom the CCL also evaluates for retention. (There will be a judicial retention election here in November.) In 1984, when the CCL found criminal court judge Thomas Maloney unqualified for retention, he called the council's members a bunch of "barely competent and incompetent misfits and malcontents." Maloney was retained by voters, but went to prison in 1994 for fixing murder cases."
One set of candidates of interest to me are running for the MWRD (Municipal Water Reclamation District) of Greater Chicago. WTTW profiled and talked to the MWRD candidates. Having gone through them, I'm going to vote for the Green Party candidates. They're not perfect. These Greens seem to be in favor of selling long-term leased property and returning it to tax rolls. I have a problem with that in that it supports the kind of systemic inequality that contributes to abysmal urban living conditions under capitalist systems. I'd rather see publicly-owned land be put to public uses. But other than that, the Green party candidates focus on some important environmental issues that I think would be good to address. More info about them here.
They got it right in this past instance, mentioned in a Chicago Reader story! "The CCL evaluations have sometimes offended sitting judges, whom the CCL also evaluates for retention. (There will be a judicial retention election here in November.) In 1984, when the CCL found criminal court judge Thomas Maloney unqualified for retention, he called the council's members a bunch of "barely competent and incompetent misfits and malcontents." Maloney was retained by voters, but went to prison in 1994 for fixing murder cases."
One set of candidates of interest to me are running for the MWRD (Municipal Water Reclamation District) of Greater Chicago. WTTW profiled and talked to the MWRD candidates. Having gone through them, I'm going to vote for the Green Party candidates. They're not perfect. These Greens seem to be in favor of selling long-term leased property and returning it to tax rolls. I have a problem with that in that it supports the kind of systemic inequality that contributes to abysmal urban living conditions under capitalist systems. I'd rather see publicly-owned land be put to public uses. But other than that, the Green party candidates focus on some important environmental issues that I think would be good to address. More info about them here.
