Every election cycle, I’m asked the same thing. How should I vote on the judges?
This is the text I’ve been sending to people this round: “Thx for asking. The problem with identifying allied judges publicly is that they then get “outed” and the AK Judicial Council (very biased, liberal Bar Association-led group) keeps them from advancing up the ladder. I’ve seen it many times before. All the judges almost always get retained anyway unless the AJC doesn’t recommend them. Whenever there are good judges up for retention who are aligned with Justices like Antonin Scalia or Samuel Alito, and that is rare, I tell people privately. I don’t ever say anything publicly. The two good ones I know about this cycle are XXX and XXX. I’d vote no on all the others. Hope that’s helpful.”
For the next few days before November 3rd, when the requests pick up, I’ll send them a link to this article. Everyone needs to chew on this reality. It takes a bit of work to understand it but we are talking about the third branch of Government and it is most certainly broken in our state.
A very prominent Alaskan politician once told me awhile back that when he was in office, another well-known public office holder told him, “You Republicans may hold on to the Governor or the Legislature, but we’ll always have the Judiciary.”
How true that has been from the get go.
The quote we have shouted from the mountaintops since our founding is from a consultant report provided to the original delegates of the Alaska State Constitution. The delegates were seeking advice on how they were proposing to create our system of appointing judges in the newly formed 49th State.
Here is a direct quote from that report:
“No state constitution has ever gone this far in placing one of the three branches of the government beyond the reach of democratic controls. We feel that in its desire to preserve the integrity of the courts, the convention has gone farther than is necessary or safe (emphasis added) in putting them in the hands of a private professional group, however, public-spirited its members may be.”
Yep. Those who were called on because of their expertise in state judicial selection systems called our proposed system “beyond the reach of democratic controls” and not even “safe” because of the power given to the Alaska Bar Association. The Judicial Committee of the original Alaska State Constitution delegation, who had asked for the advice not only ignored that advice— they never even showed it to the full delegation.
The selection process they chose, known as the Missouri Plan, is led by a group called the Alaska Judicial Council (AJC), made up of three attorney members of the Alaska Bar Association who are not confirmed by the Alaska Legislature and three non-attorney members chosen by the Governor who have to be confirmed by the Alaska Legislature before sitting on the AJC. The AJC interviews and decides which judicial candidates get passed on to the Governor for confirmation. If there is a tie, three members vote for and three against a candidate, the Chief Justice of the Alaska Supreme Court casts the deciding vote.
Alaska Family Council began dissecting this plan from our founding in 2006 and it became obvious very quickly that candidates who were pegged as “conservative” in any manner, regardless of their qualifications, were not approved by the AJC and sent up to the Governor. Even when conservative Governors get to place non-attorney members on the AJC, those members either fell in line eventually with what the attorneys told them to do or their vote got outnumbered by the liberal attorney members. In other words, if you are an attorney and are interested in being a judge in Alaska, you better keep your “conservative-ness” below radar.
As we noted back in 2020 with a study Alaska Family Council commissioned, the Alaska Bar Association is much more liberal than the state of Alaska. In fact, “Among their members, Democrats outnumber Republicans by a wide margin— 27.48% to 15.85%. That’s nearly the polar opposite of Alaska voters as a whole, where Republicans outnumber Democrats 24.25% to 12.83%.”
As Must Read Alaska just reported, there have been many attempts over the years to provide some balance and have the Alaska judiciary be more reflective of the people. All of those attempts have been thwarted by the Alaska Legislature and almost always, the Democrats have fought those efforts.
Ultimately, the Alaska Judicial Council should only decide if candidates are qualified to serve on the bench and then send all of those candidates to the Governor who makes the appointment. But the word “qualified” is where the AJC gets to hide. As they have referred to, they only select the “tallest timber” to send on to the Governor. If you have been identified as a conservative, you are a small tree— no matter how qualified you are.
And— as that same article by Must Read Alaska refers to— there have been massive consequences to having such a liberal judiciary, the worst of which is how the Alaska Supreme Court finds a “right to abortion” hiding in the privacy clause of our State Constitution. There is not, just as the Dobbs case noted there is no such right in the U.S. Constitution.
To fix our judicial system, which is anything but apolitical despite what the AJC and their advocates constantly claim, we can either pass legislation to amend the constitution, something that requires a 2/3 majority, or we can do it at a Constitutional Convention that comes up for a vote every ten years. The 2/3 majority is likely out of reach as we can barely get a simple majority when a few power-hungry Republicans keep giving power to Democrats every legislative session. The next vote for calling a Constitutional Convention is in 2030. It will take lots of work to get a yes on that, but it is worth the effort.
At a Constitutional Convention, we can bring back some balance to the judicial selection process, heeding the advice of those consultants back in 1955, and we can clarify how our State Constitution is silent on the issue of ending the lives of pre-born Alaskans.
In the meantime, vote no on all the judges. Unless there are a few worth voting for and you have my cell.
Early voting for the 2026 general election is underway. Do your part— go vote today!
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