By Lindsey Collom
The Arizona Republic
Rapid growth in Pinal County has triggered a shift away from direct election of judges and also exposed potential weaknesses in a system that has gone untested since its inception 38 years ago.
State law requires the largest counties — those with a population of 250,000 or more — to implement a method of choosing Superior Court judges through a nonpartisan commission.
But the law, created by a 1974 ballot initiative, gives no blueprint for how and when to start a commission from scratch — primarily because, when the state’s population was 1.8 million, the framers never anticipated that any county other than Maricopa and Pima would reach the 250,000 mark. Today, Arizona’s population is 6.4 million, according to the 2010 census.
Pinal County’s population hit 375,770 that year.
When Pinal County crossed that threshold, it also had to expand its Board of Supervisors from three to five members, triggering a series of processes that county and courts officials say had to occur before they could begin work on forming a commission to select judges.
The upshot is that a Superior Court vacancy in Pinal County could be filled without going through the merit-selection process prescribed under the state Constitution. The process aims to minimize political influence by promoting the best-qualified applicants to the bench and has become a national model for selecting judges. The Constitution requires the commission to submit names of at least three prospective judges to the governor within 60 days of a vacancy. If that doesn’t happen, the governor can fill the spot directly.
