Rep. Marcia Morey, D-Durham, recalled how she and her late colleague in the North Carolina General Assembly, Joe John, D-Wake, ended up in the state legislature in 2017.
"We had both been judges and we were both elected in nonpartisan races," Morey said.
In John's honor, Morey has filed a bill this year that would return North Carolina to a nonpartisan, publicly-funded format for electing judges. Morey contended the integrity of the state's judiciary depends on it.
"Let's get the best qualified lawyers to be judges, do it on merit, get public financing of their races, take the money and the politics out of judicial races, and have good jurists," she said.
For much of state history, judicial races were partisan
Starting in the late 1990s with trial court judges, the Democratic-led legislature began transitioning from partisan to nonpartisan judicial elections. By 2004, all judicial races in the state were nonpartisan and remained that way through the 2010s. And there was public financing for some of those years.
Republicans gained control of the state legislature in 2010 and eventually went back to partisan races for judicial seats. By 2020, all judicial races had been changed back to a partisan format.
Since then, Republicans have dominated statewide races for North Carolina's Supreme Court and Court of Appeals.
And in recent years, litigation in high-profile, politically sensitive cases has brought scrutiny to the partisan affiliations of state judges. Redistricting, voter photo ID, and now, a disputed state Supreme Court race.
Republican Jefferson Griffin is a judge on the state Court of Appeals. He trails incumbent Democratic justice Allison Riggs by 734 votes in a race for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court.
The state elections board dismissed Griffin's protest over more than 65,000 ballots he wants discarded because of alleged irregularities. After a superior court judge upheld that dismissal, Griffin appealed to the Court of Appeals.
Griffin recused himself from the matter, as has Riggs from any hearings on the dispute at the state Supreme Court level. But a fellow Republican appeals court judge has contributed to Griffin's legal expense fund.
On the state Supreme Court, Chief Justice Paul Newby's wife has contributed to Griffin's political campaign while the husband of Democratic Associate Justice Anita Earls has donated to Riggs.
But appearances aside, there's not a lot of evidence that removing partisan labels from judicial candidates will make the process of electing judges less politicized.
GOP gains spurred switch to nonpartisan judicial races
From the end of the Civil War all the way through most of the 1990s, judges in North Carolina were elected in partisan races. And, for a time, superior court trial judges who served in districts were elected in statewide races, a practice struck down by a federal judge in 1992.
"No Republican had ever been elected a superior court judge in North Carolina because the elections were statewide," said Gerry Cohen, who served as director of bill drafting at the North Carolina General Assembly from 1981 until 2014. "That's when we were still a one-party Democratic state, basically."
Cohen said the federal judge's order had a measurable impact on the outcome of judicial races in North Carolina.
"Suddenly Republicans were being elected," he said.
Cohen, now an appointed member of the Wake County Board of Elections, said the goal of good government was one motive behind Democrats' effort to reshape judicial elections, but partisan interest certainly was another.
"It was really about the changing political ground in North Carolina," posited Michael Bitzer, who teaches politics and history at Catawba College.
Fewer voters marked ballots in nonpartisan judicial races
Bitzer, author of "Redistricting and Gerrymandering in North Carolina: Battlelines in the Tar Heel State," bolstered Gerry Cohen's contention that Democratic lawmakers in the 1990s wanted to stem the tide of GOP gains in judicial elections.
"Typically, voters tend to vote for the incumbent," Bitzer said, explaining Democrats' reasoning behind changing the format for electing judges. "And if there are more Democrats in judicial spots, they would have a better chance of winning reelection."
But Gerry Cohen noted that removing partisan labels for judicial candidates had another, perhaps unintended, effect: a drop-off in voter participation in those races. Cohen said that without the judicial candidate information the partisan labels provided, fewer voters marked that part of their ballots.
"Suddenly a third of the voters left it blank," said Cohen.
And Cohen argued that even if judges run without partisan labels, one can't remove politics from judicial races.
"The parties filled in the vacuum by having slate cards, but the problem is a lot of voters don't get those," Cohen said.
"The people of our state want to know those things and I don't that think we get any sort of better government or better judges by, you know, hiding that on the ballot from people," said State House Speaker Destin Hall, R-Caldwell, Watauga, promoting what he sees as the benefit of providing voters with information about the political affiliation of judicial candidates.
GOP control of the state legislature means Morey's bill to revert to non-partisan judicial races has little chance of advancing.
But even if it did, rather than de-politicizing judicial races, Political Science Professor Michael Bitzer said it would more likely result in fewer voters making choices in those nonpartisan races at the bottom of the ballot.
