This story was originally published in Capital B Gary.
By Calvin Davis
Capital B Gary
December 2, 2024
When Gary and Lake County residents went to the polls this year, they had no voice in one of the most consequential areas of local government: electing the judges who decide on criminal justice, family disputes, and community life.
This lack of representation is not an anomaly; it is the result of a decades-old system affecting only Indiana’s most racially diverse counties: Lake, Marion, and St. Joseph. Together, these counties — home to the majority of the state’s Black and minority populations — rely on appointed judges, stripping residents of the ability to vote directly. Given the outsized influence judges wield over their communities, the system has raised concerns about equity and representation. Now, local officials are turning to the courts to challenge what they see as a racially biased and undemocratic process.
“The obvious question is, why is there a distinction between the merit system in those counties and the elected system in the other counties?” state Sen. Lonnie Randolph asked. “The emphasis has got to be a racial situation. There’s no other explanation.”
Judges in Indiana’s local courts typically serve six-year terms and, in most counties, are elected by voters, much like mayors or state representatives.
In Lake, St. Joseph, and Marion counties, however, the process is entirely different. Judges are appointed through a merit-based system: lawyers apply for open seats, and a local nominating commission selects finalists to forward to the governor for appointment. These judges are not elected and never face a competitive race. Voters can only decide whether to retain a sitting judge through yes-or-no vote on the ballot, and a rejection merely leads to another gubernatorial appointment.
Nearly two-thirds of Indiana’s Black voting-age population resides in the three counties using this system, according to 2020 Census data: Marion, with 193,504 Black adults; Lake, with 89,806; and St. Joseph, with 25,176. Together, these counties account for 66% of the state’s 467,861 Black adults.
As a result, two-thirds of black people of voting age in Indiana — those who reside in Lake, Marion and St. Joseph Counties — are unable to vote to elect their state court judges.
“It’s discrimination, and it’s a way to suppress African-Americans when it comes to the judicial process and the judicial system,” Randolph told Capital B Gary.
“We have the right to vote on the legislative branch and the executive branch. [Not] the third branch of government — the judiciary. So why is it that we’re not allowed in Lake County to vote on judicial officers when 88 other counties do?”
Lake County, like most Indiana counties, allowed residents to elect Superior Court judges until the early 1970s, when the state legislature stripped that right from Lake and St. Joseph counties following the creation of the Indiana Judicial Nominating committee and a constitutional amendment for appellate judges that was eventually applied to trial judges. The change established the merit-based appointment system still in use today.
The recent battles for Lake County’s voting rights began in the Statehouse. In 2005, former state Rep. and current Lake County Councilman Charlie Brown introduced House Bill 1354, which sought to reinstate the election of judges in Lake County and repeal provisions related to the Lake County Judicial Nominating Commission. During the 2021 legislative session, Randolph was the sole sponsor of Senate Bill 31, similarly aimed at restoring Lake County’s right to open judicial elections. Since then, he’s been on a crusade of sorts, unsuccessfully submitting bills almost every year to get Lake County its direct judicial voting rights back.
Unable to address the issue through the legislature, Lake County officials turned to the courts for relief almost three years ago. Last year, Randolph joined Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. in a lawsuit demanding Lake County residents regain the right to directly elect their Superior Court judges — a bold challenge to Indiana’s judicial system.
State Sen. Rodney Pol, a former Gary city attorney, said litigation was the only viable path.
“I don’t think there’s an appetite in the legislature to change the system,” Pol said.
“Whether that is for political reasons or what, I really don’t know. But I don’t think the situation can be corrected if we don’t go through the legal system. You’ve got to fight the battles where you can win them.”
The case first came before U.S. District Court Judge Philip P. Simon, who ruled in favor of the state but noted that his decision was bound by legal precedent rather than his own interpretation of the case.
In his decision, Simon wrote that he had “substantial doubts that the Voting Rights Act isn’t being violated by the differential treatment of Lake County voters.”
Simon went further in his written opinion, criticizing the racial implication of Indiana’s judicial selection process.
“How is it that 66% of blacks in Indiana are prevented from voting for superior court judges when more than 80% of whites can?” he asked. “More startling still is the fact that the State has all but admitted that there is a race-based motivation behind this paradigm.”
That admission, written in an affidavit from the Indiana secretary of state’s general counsel, justified the merit system as essential for “highly populated and highly diverse jurisdictions” like Lake County to limit political influence in the courts.
Simon called the reasoning racial on its face:
“Let’s not beat around the bush,” he wrote. “The reference to ‘diversity’ is a not-so-subtle reference to race. In the language, the State of Indiana has imposed a procedure on Lake County that denies its citizens the right to vote for superior court judges on account of race or color.”
For Pol, the idea of representation is at the heart of his discontent with Indiana’s current judicial election system.
“People don’t believe in a government in which they don’t feel like they’re represented. I think that disengages and disenfranchises entire populations of people when they don’t get to elect who represents them.”
The case was last heard in September in the U.S. Court of Appeals’ 7th Circuit, where attorney Bradley Dick, representing the city of Hammond, argued that an acceptable remedy would be to allow open elections in Lake County as opposed to retention votes.
“That would not require rewriting anything throughout the whole state,” said Dick. “The rest of the state could remain exactly as it is today, and it would just be returning Lake County to what it’s been for the majority of its existence.”
Dick agreed with Judge John Lee’s hypothetical remedy of having judicial appointments and retention in all counties, so long as procedures are applied evenly across all voting groups.
“It just can’t be [done] in a way when you end up with these shocking disparities by only doing it in the three highest minority counties,” he said.
Local judges play a crucial role in shaping the experiences of communities, handling cases that directly affect daily life, including housing disputes, criminal charges, child custody, and small claims. Due to systemic numerous inequalities, these cases disproportionately affect minority communities.
Given this situation, judges can make all the difference in an individual’s involvement in the legal system. Fair and empathetic rulings can help mitigate the broader effects of inequality, while biased decisions risk perpetuating even more systemic harm.
Judicial votes often fly under the radar, overshadowed by higher-profile races and hampered by scant media coverage. Voters cast ballots with little insight into the judicial performance shaping their communities. This quiet trend underscores a larger challenge: the gap between democratic ideals and the informed engagement needed to sustain them. In the 2024 General Election, more than 50,000 fewer Lake County voters cast votes in judicial elections than did in the presidential race.
Appointed judges in Lake County effectively receive lifetime appointments, with retention rates consistently exceeding 70%. Once on the bench, judges rarely face removal; no sitting judge up for retention has been voted out in the past nine election cycles since 2008.
“The emphasis on judicial elections is not there in terms of media, or in terms of public consciousness, and the way we look at elections,” said Charles Preston, community engagement manager for Chicago’s Injustice Watch. Injustice Watch creates a judicial election guide that is distributed to residents of Cook County, including those who are incarcerated. In it, they provide analysis of judicial candidates, reporting their salary, judicial experience, and ratings to help voters make more informed decisions.
“People treat the judicial part of the ballot like it’s something obscure,” Preston told Capital B Gary.
“They don’t vote for it at all, or they vote on a line, or they look for a name that matches their identity. But that’s not an informed vote if you really don’t know what you’re voting on.”
Highlighting the far-reaching impacts of local judges, Preston emphasized how their decisions shape the realities of everyday life.
“You want to divorce? You got to a judge. You want custody of your child, order of protection from an abuser, you go to a judge. If you protest and get arrested, you go to a judge. You may not meet the president of the United States, you may not meet your senator, but I guarantee you, at some point you’ll probably run into a judge.”
Calvin Davis is Capital B Gary’s government and politics reporter. You can reach Calvin at calvin.davis@capitalbnews.org.
Capital B is a Black-led, nonprofit local and national news organization reporting for Black communities across the country.
