If we are going to elect our judges, we should use partisanballots

While at a federal level judges are appointed by the President, in 22 states they are elected. One characteristic of many of these judicial elections is that ballots are nonpartisan, an innovation that was introduced with the intention of forcing voters to evaluate candidates more closely. In new research which examines a court race in North Carolina, Craig M. Burnett and Lydia Tiede find that nonpartisan ballots only make decision making more difficult for voters. They also find that partisan voters prefer candidates to be labelled, so as to best match their preferences, but also that labelling candidates helps independent voters to decide who most closely matches their own policy interests as well.