A Voter Guide for Judicial Races, but Most Candidates Didn’t Provide Info

Even the most educated New York City voter faces challenges when it comes to the judicial races. There are no debates and there is little other campaigning. The options can be pretty limited: On this year’s ballot, there are only Democrats running for court seats in Manhattan, while in Brooklyn the Republican, Democrat and Conservative lines for a number of judicial seats are all occupied by the same name. And let’s face it: Few of us (including a certain veteran metro reporter) can keep straight the difference between Supreme Court and Civil Court.

But there’s no confusion about the fact that courts are really important, and that elections to the courts are pretty consequential: Where else can a person be elected to a 10- or 14-year-term, as comes with some of these judicial seats?

So it’s handy that the state’s Unified Court System has produced a Voter Guide so we may research the folks asking voters to give them a decade or more of authority over family matters, major financial disputes and criminal cases.

The problem is, most judicial candidates didn’t bother to send biographies in to the guide. So while there is a little information about each candidate, only 37 percent of the hopefuls have provided bios.

The impact varies borough to borough. In Manhattan, which gets all the breaks, 10 out of 12 candidates (83 percent) sent in their bios. But in Brooklyn, only two out of 16 (11 percent) did.

City Limits would love to fill out the picture of who these candidates are. If you know who any of the folks below who have not sent in their bio are, please email that information to [email protected]. If you are running yourself, by all means, send us your bio. We will publish what we can verify.

After initial publication, we updated the list below to reflect changes made to the state guide. At the suggestion of readers, we also added indications of whether any candidates had submitted their qualifications to the Independent Judicial Election Qualification Commission (only four had) and, per a nudge from another reader, added the ratings prepared by the New York City Bar Association.