Most of the energy and attention in this year’s election have been sucked up by the wild presidential contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Still, there are other contests on the ballot today, and some of them will leave voters in this area scratching their heads about whom to pick.
That’s particularly true for the Mississippi Supreme Court race in the Northern District.
There are four seemingly qualified candidates in the race — two attorneys and two circuit judges — but for the vast majority of voters, we suspect they don’t know enough about any of them to make a thoughtful decision over which one is best-suited to sit on this state’s highest court.
The situation reinforces one of the major reasons that Mississippi has no business electing appellate judges.
Continuing to do so creates one of two dilemmas:
• Either the candidates’ forces have to raise a ton of money — and thus compromise the winning jurists’ impartiality — to build the name recognition in an area that covers a third of the state;
• Or they run low-profile, low-budget campaigns that leave voters in the dark as to who they are and their qualifications.
This year, we have seen both scenarios play out in different parts of the state.
In the Central District, the two candidates — incumbent Jim Kitchens and challenger Kenny Griffis — are expected to spend about $1 million combined on that race. In addition, outside groups — mostly targeting Kitchens — are running misleading attack ads that make the incumbent look like a friend of murderers and child predators. That race, as with some similarly contentious races in the past, belies the pretense that Mississippi’s races are nonpartisan. The candidates may not have party labels, but it’s clear that Kitchens is largely the Democratic, pro-plaintiff candidate, and Griffis, the Republican, pro-business one.
Meanwhile, in the Northern District, it’s been a largely sleepy affair. To our knowledge, only one of the four candidates, John Brady, made a public campaign appearance in Greenwood, and that was back in July. If Bobby Chamberlin, Steve Crampton or James T. “Jim” Kitchens Jr. came to town, they did so quietly.
Thus, you have voters here today — and probably in many other parts of the 32-county district — casting their ballots for this race on the most cursory of information, and probably some bad information, too. The Jim Kitchens in the Northern District is probably getting tarred by the attack ads directed at the Jim Kitchens in the Central District in a case of mistaken identity. The two are not even related. Meanwhile, Brady sounds like a fine candidate, but we would not be surprised if the Columbus attorney wins more on his alphabetical advantage (appearing first on the ballot) than on his credentials.
There is a better way to select Supreme Court judges — by appointment. More than half of the states use some form of it.
The process we have long advocated, called the “Missouri plan” after the state that first implemented it, is a hybrid of appointive and elective systems.
Judges are initially appointed to the bench by the governor, using a vetting system that tries to ensure the nominees have the right professional credentials and integrity to serve. Periodically, the sitting judges come up for retention elections, where voters decide whether they get to keep their job. If they are rejected, the appointment process begins anew.
Today’s election reinforces the point that the Missouri system is far superior to the Mississippi one.
