From 4 News Now Anchor Derek Deis:
I just finished a story earlier this week on how we can judge the judges on the November ballot. Because let's be honest, judicial candidates are often the candidates we know the least before we cast our votes. Plus, because they're judges, they're nonpartisan candidates, so there's no easy to way to figure out what they're all about, what they believe in, how they enforce the rule of law, etc.
So I talked to a couple of local experts to see what they had to say about how we can learn more about judicial candidates and make better educated decisions when we fill out our ballots. Darren Digiacinto, a principal attorney at Winston & Cashat and the incoming president of the Spokane County Bar Association's Board of Trustees, and Michael Cecil, an assistant professor at the Gonzaga School of Law, were tremendously helpful in this. Digiacinto described the entire process of how the Bar Association gets its judicial candidate evaluation results, which are available on its website. Cecil talked about other ways you can research judicial candidates simply by jumping online. But both of them made perfectly clear that it's very important to do your own homework on these candidates, because judges have a lot of authority and can play a massive role in our everyday lives.
I hope you'll find my story helpful and I hope it will motivate you to go beyond your voter's pamphlet and dig deeper into the judicial candidates before the November election.
