The March primary election will be another record-breakingly uncompetitive one for seats on the Cook County Circuit Court, with 62 candidates running for 40 vacant seats on the court — more than a third unopposed in countywide and subcircuit races.

Observers had flagged the previous primary in 2022 as a historically uncompetitive one, blaming a shifted election schedule in which candidates were forced outside to collect nominating petition signatures in the cold of winter while the Covid-19 pendermic was still in full swing.

But in that June 2022 primary, 64 candidates were vying for 25 open seats, a ratio of 2.5 candidates per seat. This year’s primary ballot shakes out to 1.5 candidates per seat.

Injustice Watch spoke with election lawyers, campaign workers, consultants, candidates, and politicians for insights on why so few people are running for judge.

They cited overlapping factors, including the rising costs of running campaigns, political fatigue, an Illinois Supreme Court that this year was unusually slow to formalize vacancies, a redrawing of the map of judicial subcircuits, and a Cook County Democratic Party that says it is focused more on endorsing candidates with hard-to-beat credentials.

“There are not many people running for anything,” said Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who is also chair of the county party. “I’d like to think it’s because people have decided that it’s a waste of your time and energy to run against the party, but I can’t speak for what’s really happening.”

The collapse of patronage

Largely gone is the old system in which longtime former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, longtime former Chicago Ald. Edward Burke, 14th, and the mayors Daley sat atop a patronage system that often backed candidates for judges more because of loyalty than qualifications. Burke was convicted on federal corruption charges last year. Madigan awaits trial in a separate corruption case.

Preckwinkle, who became a committeeperson in 1992, said she remembers when the slate of judicial candidates seemed like “a foregone conclusion” favoring “white guys with Irish names.”

“I’d say it’s profoundly different; it’s not one person’s show anymore,” Preckwinkle added, describing the party’s judicial endorsement process today. “It’s more democratic, small ‘d.’”

Burke — whose wife, Anne Burke, was chief justice of the Illinois Supreme Court justice until she retired in the wake of his indictment — bluntly acknowledged the old way of slating judges during the 2008 process when he said: “It was a hell of a lot easier in the old days, when Mayor Richard J. Daley handed you a list.”

Control by Democratic kingmakers, which included a handful of South  and West Side ward bosses, extended beyond the slating process, as well. Magidan, for example, would write letters on his legislative letterhead telling Cook County judges who he wanted them to appoint as associate judges, jobs with slightly lower pay but all the same benefits as elected judges, as well as all-but-guaranteed lifetime tenure.

Who used to become a judge thanks to Cook County Democrats? Mostly men, mostly Irish, often prosecutors, and government attorneys.

“Judges in many ways used to be just an extension of the sophisticated, suited patronage that came out of the ward organizations,” says longtime judicial politics observer Brendan Shiller, a former criminal defense and civil rights lawyer who helped found the short-lived but influential Judicial Accountability PAC.

“The uneducated precinct captains went to streets and san and water, and the educated ones went to corporation counsel and state’s attorney and then became judges,” Shiller said. “All of those folks were just dumbass precinct captains who managed to get a law degree.”

Preckwinkle said when she was a lowly committeeperson without much power in the party, she “didn’t always support the people on the slate because A) I didn’t think some of them were qualified, and B) because the slates weren’t diverse.”

The judicial subcircuits — geographic districts where voters cast ballots for judges who live relatively nearby — were introduced in the early 1990s after a long push by Republicans, Black, and Latinx groups to create an avenue for more political and ethnic diversity on the bench.

The party didn’t endorse in the subcircuits, leaving more room for communities and local politicos to get their people on the ballot. The bench grew more diverse. Still, as the Chicago Reader noted in 2004, voters had “a clear preference for O’Judges and McJudges.”

By the early 2000s, the power of the ward organizations was waning. The old Chicago Democratic Party machine had been sputtering since a series of federal lawsuits dealt devastating blows to the patronage system, and the implementation of the Shakman consent decrees made it illegal to maintain armies of cronies in city and county jobs. Young women with Irish names and scant experience (usually as prosecutors) began performing disproportionately well with voters, even without the party’s backing.

In 2004, the party’s slate performed unusually poorly, according to internal party data. Just 67% of the slate of candidates won their races in 2004.

Since then, the party gradually began revamping its slating. 

“The majority of the people in this county are people of color, and we wanted these slates to be diverse by gender and race and tribe,” Preckwinkle told Injustice Watch. “We’ve worked hard for more than a decade to make that so.”

One change was to create a “pre-slating” event to weed out potential dud candidates earlier in the process; in recent years, the party has even hosted free “Road to the Robe” seminars inviting anyone interested in running to learn about judicial elections and the associate judge appointment process.

Longtime committeepeople seconded Preckwinkle in saying the process has grown more democratic. No one person in the party wields the power Burke and Madigan had because that influence sprung from old-style machine politics built on patronage and loyalty, those committeepeople said. Preckwinkle, instead, runs a more progressive party.

In a break that would have been unthinkable in the old days, the 2022 election saw some committeemen put the party candidates’ opponents on their palm cards. Meanwhile, longtime party loyalists weren’t guaranteed a spot on the slate.

Jim Gleffe, who flaunted his roots in Madigan’s ward organization and had spent his whole career in government jobs, had negative rankings from more than half of the reviewing bar associations. The party didn’t slate him, and he lost a two-way race on the home turf of his Southwest Side subcircuit.

Getting the party’s backing, of course, isn’t a guaranteed ticket to the bench. Howard Brookins, a committeeperson and a former alderman who lost a judicial race, despite being slated in 2022, said: “It’s one thing to slate and another thing to win, as I can attest to.”

The process now is more open and contentious than it once was, said Rod Sawyer, a former alderman and a committeeman since 2012, who has been observing slating since his father, former Chicago City Council member and Mayor Eugene Sawyer, was involved decades ago.

Sawyer said the changes have been good, but he voiced concerns about recent races in which slated candidates — particularly Black men — lost. 

“Back when I was growing up, no one else ran in that primary,” Sawyer said. “That person was slated; that person won. That was it. Now, not so much.”

An expensive game, but ‘we keep winning’

The first step to getting on the ballot is collecting enough valid nominating petition signatures from registered voters to qualify. Candidates can either do the work themselves with the help of family and friends or pay someone to collect for them.

Campaign strategists agree it’s almost impossible to collect the 2,610 needed signatures to run for a countywide seat — especially when you’re a working lawyer — without paying someone to help. These days, the “reputable vendors” are charging around $5 per signature.

The price has gone up — just as all prices have — explained Richard Bartolomei, who runs a company candidates can hire to collect petition signatures.

Finding reliable workers is challenging as a post-Covid-19 pandemic economic rebound offers good jobs that aren’t as much hard work. Signature collectors spend hours outside striking up conversations with passersby and trying to break through reflexive suspicion, earphones, and the pull of busy schedules.

“If it rains in the morning but dry in the afternoon but it’s still gray — people don’t want to stop,” Bartolomei said. “Everyday life in Chicago is harder, public transit is a mess, crime has ticked up, people are more guarded on the whole.”

A slated candidate saves on the expense of signature collection because the party’s volunteers and vendors collect signatures for the whole slate on one petition, but one of the requirements of being slated is kicking in $45,000 to the party.

Preckwinkle said of the candidates’ fundraising obligation to the party: “We work on behalf of our candidates, and we ask our candidates to help us do that work. I don’t see anything unreasonable about that.”

Once they file their nominating paperwork and signatures, candidates may have to spend thousands more mounting or fending off legal challenges. And if they make it to the ballot, there’s more to spend on campaigning.

“There’s immense, incalculable benefit to working together and pooling the resources,” said judicial campaign consultant and 46th Ward committeeman Sean Tenner.

Since the collapse of the old Democratic Party in judicial politics, groups of candidates have tried to band together in “alternative slates,” such as the Irish women, the state’s attorneys, or the Black lawyers in private practice, with some degree of success. Still, most of the party’s picks win every election cycle. This year, there was only one alternative slate — a group of Black women who collected nominating petition signatures together.

Asked about the low filings in judicial races, Jacob Kaplan, the executive director of the Cook County Democratic Party, cited internal figures showing 81% of the party’s slated candidates won in 2022.

“If you look at our record, we keep winning,” he said. “People get tired of running against the party and not winning.”

Kaplan said the party’s slate had another leg up this cycle: Most of them had already been appointed to temporarily fill circuit court seats by the Illinois Supreme Court.

“A lot of the candidates appointed by the supreme court are highly qualified, so people didn’t want to run against them,” he said.

Supreme Court influence and subcircuit confusion 

The Illinois Supreme Court isn’t just responsible for temporarily filling vacant judicial seats — a process of limited transparency, as Injustice Watch’s reporting has shown. It is also up to the state high court to make judicial vacancies publicly known by certifying them to the Illinois State Board of Elections.

Most of this election cycle’s available judgeships — 29 of the 40 vacancies — are in subcircuits. Running there is typically an attractive avenue to the bench for candidates too intimidated by the party’s slate or too cash poor to compete against it. The party does not name its preference in these positions, and only 1,000 petition signatures are needed to get on the ballot.

Only three of the subcircuit seats already had an Illinois Supreme Court-appointed candidate when the window for petition circulation opened.

However, to run in a subcircuit, a candidate must first know the vacancy is available and exactly where the subcircuit boundaries are located, so they can be sure they qualify.

In 2022, the state Legislature redrew the subcircuits for the first time in 30 years, adding five new subcircuits in Cook County.

The law was clarified in the beginning of 2023 to convert up to 10 associate judgeships into subcircuits in every election cycle until every subcircuit in Cook County has 11 judges total. Though the law stated the new maps would go into effect in 2024, for most of last year, debates continued about whether the 2024 election cycle would be affected.

With the new law on the books, the Cook County clerk is supposed to make public detailed maps of each subcircuit. Meanwhile, the Illinois Supreme Court is supposed to certify each existing judicial vacancy and its location. After the certification, the State Board of Elections then publicizes the vacancy to make potential candidates aware of their eligibility.

Last year, it took until mid-August for the clerk’s office to post the maps, even though the subcircuit boundaries were finalized more than a year before. Disagreement persists over what caused the delay.

“There were legal questions that arose relating to legislative intent, so the State Board of Elections requested that we wait until those questions were clarified before posting maps,” a spokesperson for the clerk told Injustice Watch.

State Board of Elections spokesman Matt Dietrich told Injustice Watch the clerk had been asked to wait because they were waiting for the Illinois Supreme Court “to make sure the subcircuits were properly allocated.”

But there were no legal challenges for the Illinois Supreme Court to resolve regarding how the subcircuit boundaries had been drawn.

Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice Mary Jane Theis declined a request for an interview. Her spokesman Christopher Bonjean denied any delay was caused by the high court and told Injustice Watch the court was not responsible for other agencies’ confusion. He said the court was waiting for the detailed maps from the clerk to certify judicial vacancies.

After the maps were made public Aug. 15, the supreme court transmitted the subcircuit vacancy certifications to the State Board of Elections — only one week before candidates were allowed to start gathering petition signatures in early September.

State law only requires the supreme court to certify vacancies 100 days before election day, but Dietrich told Injustice Watch the court typically transmits the certified vacancies a month in advance of petition circulation time.

A review of election board records backs him up. In 2020, vacancies were certified 42 days before the beginning of petition circulation. In 2022, it was 29 days before.

“It was unusually late,” said Mary Kay Dawson, who has been a local campaign consultant for more than 30 years and has focused exclusively on Cook County judicial elections since 2006. “This created confusion with potential candidates, for anyone thinking of running for judge in a  subcircuit.” Multiple other sources shared this assessment, including several candidates.

Dietrich said this election cycle was unusually complex because of the subcircuit remap. “A lot of work had to go into this,” he said. “A lot of discussion among several different bodies to figure out exactly what was supposed to be done.”

Bonjean said the decrease in candidates running for judge was due less to the delay in certifications than it was to a near doubling of open seats in Cook County compared with 2022, “societal changes due to the Covid pandemic” making it difficult to collect signatures, and “confusion caused by the new subcircuit maps.”

Political fatigue and an informed electorate

Tenner ultimately blamed the lack of competition to political fatigue in an unexciting presidential election year. “I know a lot of people who were thinking of running this cycle and decided not to,” he said. “So many people are dispirited with politics.”

Shiller said another factor possibly dissuading candidates is a more informed electorate.

Access to information about judicial candidates has increased: Bar associations share their rankings online, grassroots campaigns have mobilized around judicial elections, the “Girl, I Guess Progressive Voter Guide” and Injustice Watch’s judicial election guide “make it harder for people to run for judge,” he said.

Shiller said he is optimistic more robust judicial elections will eventually emerge from a new generation of attorneys and the increased diversity on the bench.

But for now, with so many of this year’s judicial races being foregone conclusions, the Illinois Supreme Court went ahead and appointed eight of the 13 unopposed Democratic primary candidates to the vacancies they’re sure to officially win come November.

“These appointments were made out of public necessity in order to ensure an adequate level of judicial staffing,” the court announced in a press release. More such appointments are expected for primary winners who won’t face Republican challengers in the fall.

Senior reporter Dan Hinkel contributed reporting

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