These judges were rated “Not recommended” by William Hogarth in  “The Bench” (1758).

Some judges are rated as unqualified or not recommended by every one of the eleven judicial rating bodies for Cook County. Expect to see them in office next year, since they are running unopposed, or voters don’t know how awful they are.

There is an easy way to target and vote against some of the worst. You can find one page for ratings by all the Cook County judicial ratings agencies and pick out the few who are listed as “not recommended” or “not qualified”: the website of the Alliance of Bar Associations for Judicial Screening. Or you can save your votes for the “highly qualified,” or the ones recommended by your preferred ratings agency (e.g., Chicago Council of Lawyers, or the Women’s Bar Association, or an organization of minority group lawyers, all listed at voteforjudges.org).

Outside Cook County, you can use ballotpedia.org to find a list of candidates in your area, and look for ballotpedia’s “external links” for local voters guides. Or just do a web search for “voter guides (your city)” or “judicial ratings (your city).”

The Chicago Council of Lawyers explains its evaluations, while most of the bar associations only list their conclusions. Some of the Chicago Council’s “not qualified” evaluations are worth reading; they remind us that voting makes a difference, even if the systemic abuses don’t count in the ratings.

Steve Bogira at The Chicago Reader wrote about the Cook County judicial ballot and  linked to the ratings for the primaries in March — I hope he will also write about this for the general election.

These are the 11 Cook County bar associations listed by the Alliance: The Asian American Bar Association of the Greater Chicago Area (AABA), Black Women Lawyers Association of Greater Chicago (BWLA), Chicago Council of Lawyers (CCL), Cook County Bar Association (CCBA), Decalogue Society of Lawyers (DSL), Hellenic Bar Association (HBA), Hispanic Lawyers Association of Illinois (HLAI), Illinois State Bar Association (ISBA), Lesbian and Gay Bar Association of Chicago (LAGBAC), Puerto Rican Bar Association of Illinois (PRBA), and Women’s Bar Association of Illinois (WBAI).