Tuesday, November 3rd, brought the end of this year’s much discussed midterm election season, and if you are a North Carolina voter you likely participated in selecting who gets a seat on North Carolina’s Supreme Court, Appellate Court, and District Courts! These choices were certainly a novel experience for me since North Carolina has been the only state out of the four I’ve lived in to provide me with this option. North Carolina is one of 24 states which elect their judges via a popular vote, and one of just eight states which has partisan elections for judges (elections in which candidates represent political parties). Let’s take a brief look at the history of judicial elections in North Carolina with its surprising twists and turns!

Judicial elections have not always been the norm for North Carolina. In early state history, the North Carolina General Assembly appointed the state’s judges. It was not until North Carolina’s adopted its 1868 constitution that supreme court seats were changes to be selected by a popular vote. Additionally, our state did not even have an appellate court until 1965 when a constitutional amendment was adopted to authorize the creation of an intermediate court of appeals. The seats for this new court, like the supreme court, were also determined by popular elections.

All of this is not incredibly remarkable as far as state level court histories go – many states have chosen to elect their judges. The strangest aspect of North Carolina’s judicial elections though has been the flip flopping between making these elections partisan and non-partisan. North Carolina Appellate Court judges as well as District and Supreme Court judges were all subject to partisan elections throughout most of their history. But, after a hotly contested period of debate on the election process for judges in our state, the North Carolina legislature made superior court elections non-partisan in 1996 with district court elections following suit in 2001 and appellate court elections later becoming nonpartisan via the 2002 North Carolina Judicial Campaign Reform Act. Those who voted this week and paid attention to the construction of their ballot know that this change did not last long! North Carolina legislators soon discovered that voter turnout dropped in nonpartisan elections. In 2017, the state legislature again made several reforms to the North Carolina judicial system’s selection process which included returning partisan designations to the ballot for judicial elections as well as making changes to which party’s candidates would be listed first on the ballot.

Follow all that? These developments can be confusing even in this brief, stripped-down version of our state’s judicial election history. The above leaves out all of the hotly contested arguments, flipped legislature majorities, and political maneuvering that accompanied each change in how we elect our state’s judges. It’s important to remember from all this that the method in which we select our officials and the way they appear on our ballot is neither a random nor a set-in-stone decision! Behind an issue even as specific as whether a candidate in a state judicial election is affiliated with a political party on our ballots is a rich history of legislative actions and contested back-and-forth reforms.

Do judicial elections, their history, and drama interest you? If so, here are some selected resources from the Law Library where you can read more!

Chris W. Bonneau & Melinda Gann Hall, In Defense of Judicial Elections (Matthew J. Streb ed., 2009). Call number KF8776.B66 2009

The authors in this book examine data from two decades of state court elections to defend judicial elections from critics who argue that judicial positions should be appointed rather than elected.

David M. Gold, Democracy and the Courts: The Rise of Judicial Elections in the Antebellum South (2025). (Available Online)

Catalog description: “Making intensive use of primary sources, such as constitutional-convention proceedings, legislative journals, and newspapers, Gold explores the various paths taken by Southern states toward the elective judiciary and the reasons why some states accepted judicial elections only partially or rejected them altogether. He considers the effect of judicial elections on judicial review before the Civil War and looks to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, assessing the final and ironic triumph of the elective judiciary during the decidedly undemocratic Jim Crow era.”

Herbert M. Kritzer, Judicial Selection in the States: Politics and the Struggle for Reform (2020). Call number KF8776.K74 2020

This book uses case studies from US states to examine how states select and retain their judges. Much of the brief history you read above is expanded upon greatly in the chapter on North Carolina.

Herbert M. Kritzer, Justices on the Ballot: Continuity and Change in State Supreme Court Elections (2015). Call number KF8776.K75 2015

This book addresses the questions of how state supreme court elections have changed since World War II and what effects these changes have had on election outcomes, state supreme court decisions, and the public’s view of courts

Charles H. Sheldon & Linda S. Maule, Choosing Justice: The Recruitment of State and Federal Judges (1997). Call number KF8776.S5 1997

This book examines how judges weigh the competing demands of public accountability and judicial independence. The authors use case studies to examine how selection experiences impact the behavior of judges.