If you missed it, here’s the Whistleblower column about a primary primer that was published in the newspaper on Sunday.

There’s an election on Tuesday. You can be forgiven if that fact slipped your mind during the last week’s political circus.

On the Sept. 9 ballot, you will be asked to choose among people you’ve probably never heard of for extremely important jobs — judges and soil commissioners and such, which have a hard time getting attention in any year.

When I’m asked to make a choice in these races, my biggest fear is that my vote, or failure to vote, will elevate a certified nut job into public office.

So in the interests of learning how a voter can cram for an election, I decided to research one race on my ballot: the primary contest for Hennepin County district judge, seat 53.

Problem 1: There’s no incumbent. Problem 2: Six people are running.

The top two vote-getters in the primary will move on to the general election for a runoff. So how am I supposed to pass judgment on whether Paula Brummel, Liz Cutter, David Piper, Jane Ranum, Thomas Sheran or Cheri Sudit would be the best judge?

“It is a challenge,” acknowledged Keesha Gaskins, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Minnesota, whose organization is devoted to voter education. “Judicial elections are particularly difficult, because judges don’t really talk about issues,” she said.

The league features questionnaire answers from candidates on its website, www.lwvmn.org, but in the seat 53 race, only three fully-completed surveys are there. It has links to four of the six candidate websites. Update: on Monday morning, two more candidate surveys appeared on the site.

Of course, the Star Tribune also has an online voter information center.

From the league website, I found out the Wayzata/Plymouth chapter held a candidate forum in the race last month. And the video of it is available online.

For obvious reasons, lawyers follow judicial elections closely. The Hennepin County Bar Association has details and statements from all six candidates at its website.

After reading those testimonials, they all sound good to me. So how should I choose?

Mary Vasaly, the bar association president, gave me the following checklist for a good district judge: “high integrity and high moral character”; someone “independent from influences”; a good speaker and writer, experienced in both criminal and civil law; someone who has tried cases in court; a person of intelligence, even temper, compassion, with the courage of their convictions, a variety of life experiences; someone who’s physically and mentally healthy, who’s been educated in good schools and reflects the community’s diversity, and finally someone who’s been a lawyer for a while.

It sounded to me like an in-depth interview and psychological workup with each candidate was in order, all before Tuesday. Seriously, Vasaly said voters should, at the very least, check out the various websites that have information about the candidates.

The lesson: To be a fully educated voter, you’re not on your own. But you do have a ton of homework.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 9:40 am and is filed under Buyer beware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.