For better or for worse, judges are all up in our business.
Superior Court judges call the first shots on state laws. They contemplate criminal cases, wade into civil disputes and dig down into the nitty-gritty of nasty divorces and last wills.
The Court of Appeals judges then tread over trial courts’ work, weighing in on policy, property fights, prison sentences, family feuds and plenty more.
And the buck stops with seven Arizona Supreme Court justices.
But how did they get here? Who gave them the right? And that robe?
And what say do voters have when judges issue opinions they don’t like?
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Judicial elections look different depending on the court and the county.
A voter in Maricopa County would describe judicial elections as a long list of mystery names, while a voter in Yuma County envisions a judge’s campaign sign staked on the side of the road.
That’s because 11 Arizona counties use a “direct election” system, including a partisan primary and a nonpartisan general election. In those counties, Superior Court judges collect signatures and run under a political party banner like any other candidate for office.
The entire state used to operate under the same system. But in 1974, voters approved a constitutional amendment to move the Maricopa and Pima counties to a “merit selection and retention” system. (Pinal County started using merit selection in 2012, and Coconino County opted into the merit selection system in 2018.)
Under merit selection, local judicial nominating commissions vet judicial candidates and recommend new judges to the governor, who then selects a final appointment.
Voters then decide whether to keep or boot the judges from the bench at the end of a four-year term for superior court judges and a six-year term for appellate judges.
Arizona’s merit selection and retention system is generally heralded for avoiding the more obvious problems with tying a purported impartial branch of government to partisan horse races.
But at the end of the day, who isn’t interested in the political perspectives a judge might bring to the bench?
And how are you, dear voter, supposed to know a good judge from a bad one?
Before a wall of names hits your ballot, the Commission on Judicial Performance Review, or JPR — an ensemble of public members, attorneys and fellow judges — decides whether judges have the chops to stay on the bench, and make recommendations to the voters.
“It really is an educational function,” Will Auther, chair of JPR, said. “I hear a lot of people say, ‘Well, I don't know these judges. I don't have any information about them.’ And it's mainly because they just haven't looked. Or, in their defense, they don't know where to look.”
Commissioners start by sending out a survey to attorneys, litigants, witnesses, victims, jurors and court staff asking them to rate judges on a scale from one to five, similar to Yelp.
And kind of like assessing whether the waitress at Chili’s really had the right to call you a dumbass (she did), commissioners litigate each judge’s merit for staying on the bench.
Do they know the law? Have they demonstrated integrity? Do they communicate well? Can they keep their cool in the courtroom and paper-push with some efficiency?
JPR can also look over disciplinary records and rulings, take public comment and interview judges behind closed doors about any red flags.
Then, commissioners vote and decide if each judge meets or does not meet its standards.
Almost every judge clears that bar.
Auther said the point of JPR is “to make the judicial performance process as apolitical as possible.”
“We’re looking for people who are smart and hardworking, who are doing the hard work day to day in the trenches,” Auther said. “What else could you want (from) a judge, whether they're Republican, Democrat, Independent or undeclared?”
But courts, and judges, are inherently political.
Former Gov. Doug Ducey knew that as well as anyone.
Early in his first term, Ducey fired the opening shot at reshaping the judiciary by packing the Arizona Supreme Court with two additional justices, whom he appointed.1
In all, Ducey appointed five of Arizona’s now seven Supreme Court justices. (Gov. Katie Hobbs, by comparison, has appointed one.)
Then, as one of his last acts in office, Ducey expanded each division of the Court of Appeals by three more judges, whom he hand-picked.
To be fair, parties on either side of the aisle have walked away from rulings as a loser at one time or another. But Arizona’s court system took a decidedly more conservative bent post-Ducey.
And the more public-facing partisan makeup in the court slowly cranked open the floodgates of interest in judicial elections among grassroots political groups.
In 2020, Cathy Sigmon, founder of Civic Engagement Beyond Voting, released the first edition of Gavel Watch, a guide to the judges. Since then, she and a group of volunteers have scoured news stories, ethics reports, past decisions, work history and affiliations to give a fuller picture of the judges.
“We still have judges appointed by Napolitano and Brewer, as well as Ducey and Hobbs. Each of those governors also brought a perspective, and obviously they wanted to appoint qualified judges, but they also wanted a judge who somewhat shared their political perspective,” Sigmon said.
Sigmon’s group is nonpartisan, but unabashedly liberal, and its primary purpose is in looking at judges’ rulings, rather than simply whether other lawyers and court hangers-on involved in the Judicial Performance Review process think they’re qualified.
“Many of them, in fact, the vast majority of them are fair and are interpreting the law in a rational and reasonable way,” Sigmon said. “We just look for judges who are bringing a bias and a perspective to the bench that we disagree with.”
In 2022, voters kicked three Maricopa County judges off the bench, even though two of them cleared JPR’s bar.
In 2024, the Arizona Supreme Court voted to reinstate the 1864 abortion ban, leading to one political action committee formed to oppose and another formed to defend Justices Clint Bolick and Kathryn King.
Publicly, their supporters — and the PAC that stepped in to defend Bolick and King — argued they should be retained because the case against them was purely political.
The justices ruled on the abortion case based on the letter of the law, as they’re supposed to, and not political considerations, supporters argued. And that ruling made the two justices a target, compromising the independence of the judiciary branch.
But in letters to donors, Ducey wrote that given the chance, Hobbs would replace King and Bolick with “liberal activist judges.”
“That has the potential to shift the entire balance of power on the Court to the far left,” Ducey wrote in 2024.
Talk about saying the quiet part out loud!
At the time, Republican lawmakers also passed a legislative referral which would end judicial term limits and only require judges to stand for retention if JPR found an issue.
Voters roundly rejected the attempt to cut down retention votes, but they kept Bolick and King in their seats.
This year, voters won’t have the chance to weigh in on whether to curtail school vouchers after the Arizona Supreme Court knocked the Protect Education Act off the ballot.
And with that decision fresh on voters’ minds, another Ducey appointee — Justice John Lopez — is up for retention this November, along with 16 Court of Appeals judges and 72 superior court judges.
JPR releases its full survey report in September.
Sigmon’s Gavel Watch will go live sometime in October after she and her team have time to parse through the full data reports from JPR.
And as voters start paying more attention to the people in the black robes on the back of their ballots, Gavel Watch has become the premier source of info about Arizona judges — at least for liberal voters who want to know which conservative justices should get the boot.
“We don't have a budget, to be quite honest. We're not advertising Gavel Watch. We can't put it up on billboards. We can't produce yard signs or anything like that. It spreads organically,” Sigmon said. “People are looking for it. They’re really eager to get it.”
That’s all to say: Be prepared to see some two cents on which judges deserve your support this election cycle.
Sunshine on the Sunshine scandal: Republican lawmakers are pouncing on a new finding that Attorney General Kris Mayes — in clearing Gov. Katie Hobbs and Sunshine Residential Homes of wrongdoing in an investigation — did not publish details about how the organization’s leader attempted to bribe the former director of the Department of Child Safety, as reported by the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger. House Speaker Steve Montenegro claimed that the omission of the detail gave the impression that Mayes was trying to give cover to Hobbs ahead of the November election and demanded answers to several questions by the end of the week.
“Her office knew about the allegation, investigated it, and chose not to include it in the memo she released to the public. Arizonans learned about it only because of the Arizona House’s independent legislative investigation,” Montenegro said in a written statement. “The glaring holes in her investigation are now undeniable. The remaining question is whether those omissions were deliberate and whether her investigation was designed to give Governor Hobbs political cover before an election.”
No love for data centers: In other Mayes news, the attorney general has had it with data centers and is calling for a statewide pause on approving any new ones, Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports for the Arizona Mirror. Calling it the “only sane thing to do,” Mayes cited a report that the greater Phoenix area could face a 450% increase in water demand if all planned data center projects come to fruition — which is especially troubling given recent Colorado River developments.
Trickle-down economics: While a new federal plan leaves Arizona facing a 27% cut to its Colorado River supply through 2028, a Phoenix water resources manager says it won’t stop water from flowing to homes, KJZZ’s Alex Hager reports — even though 40% of the water Phoenix delivers to customers comes from the river. Meanwhile, some private water companies are already signaling that water bills in the metro area are going to rise, Alaina Mencinger writes for the Republic.
Bipartisanship isn’t dead: While cities across Arizona are cutting ties with controversial surveillance company Flock Safety and a November ballot referendum will allow voters to decide the fate of speeding cameras, politicians on both sides of the aisle are defending a 20-year-old vandal who delivered $47,000 in damages to one such speed enforcement camera, the New Times’ Morgan Fischer reports. While thousands of the alt-weekly’s readers largely cheered on the destruction of the camera, Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman said the reaction was “understandable, given the American people’s great detest for government mass surveillance,” while Phoenix City Council member Anna Hernandez noted the costly technology doesn’t sit well with residents who are frustrated with the state of the economy.
Q: What would be a better use of $47,000 for a community watchdog?
A: Sending that money to the Agenda!
Danger in the canyon: Two people are dead and more than a dozen are missing after flash floods rocked the Grand Canyon over the weekend, the Associated Press reports. Among those in the canyon when the severe flooding hit was GOP Congressman and failed gubernatorial candidate David Schweikert, who was rafting the Colorado River at the time but was able to hike to safety with his companions, KJZZ’s Katherine Davis-Young reports.
There is probably not a universe in which the police body camera footage of a Scottsdale traffic stop involving Republican Rep. Alex Kolodin is going to help the GOP nominee for secretary of state in his race for the second-most-powerful statewide office.
Even if Kolodin was never charged with a crime for the 2020 incident in which he was detained, the image of Kolodin in handcuffs is not one you want going around as a candidate — kind of like the picture of 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis riding in a tank.
And the details are ridiculous:
He and another person were riding in a vehicle with no visible license plate.
Police reported seeing something shiny being thrown out the window.
While Kolodin said it was ice, police found a can of Smirnoff Spike Sparkling Seltzer Raspberry Rosé around where the object was thrown out the window — which is perhaps the most embarrassing detail.
Kolodin, in a high-pitched squeal, expressed shock that there was a gun in the car.
It might be the punch that Kolodin, already the underdog against Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, won’t be able to recover from.
But the memes have been great, like this one referencing Kolodin’s infamous series of “Blow me” tweets.
But today’s award for best meme of the moment goes to @Arizona_bonnie for this simply stellar use of AI-generated political graphics.
1 Technically, Ducey’s opening shot at remaking the judiciary in his image was stacking the obscure Commission on Appellate Court Appointments with Republicans and independents who thought like him, which had all sorts of trickle-down consequences. But that’s a whole other edition.