Be sure to vote!

The Recorder has 'I Have No Idea:' A Ballot Crowded With Justices Leaves Voters With Lots of Questions -- Gov. Gavin Newsom's binge of appointments to the courts of appeal has created ballots filled with judicial candidates often unknown to voters.

• The sheer number of names has crowded ballots and voting materials. Los Angeles County voters alone will see the names of 18 courts of appeal justices, two Supreme Court justices—Joshua Groban and Kelli Evans—and eight candidates vying in runoffs for four superior court seats.
• State voters have been asked to retain a combined 62 courts of appeal justices across six districts. That’s the highest number in the last five general elections, and it means the future of 58% of intermediate court seats in California are in voters’ hands this year.
• Californians do not elect their appellate justices, leaving the task to the governor and the almost always approving Commission on Judicial Appointments.
• Newly appointed justices appear uncontested on the next gubernatorial election ballot and then again when their offices’ 12-year terms expire.
• Newsom has gone on a judicial-appointing binge during his last year in office. Just this year, the governor has filled 17 court of appeal vacancies. Some of the justices on the ballot have been on the bench for only a matter of months. Some have yet to take the bench as they wait for the current officeholders to retire in January.
• No California mid-level court of appeal justice has lost a retention election since the process started in 1934, according to the state’s Assembly Elections Committee.

Bloomberg Law has Exercise Your Constitutional Rights to Protect the Rule of Law by 61 former federal judges (of Keep Our Republic’s Article III Coalition):

We encourage all citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote this Election Day and to elect candidates who will fulfill their role as a check on the other branches of government. We urge Americans to contact their representative in Congress and their two senators, strongly encouraging them to apply the Constitution’s existing safeguards and where appropriate to erect new statutory ones.

There may well be an approaching tipping point beyond which it is too late. The time for citizens to speak up and act is now.