Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Eric Magnuson came out for scrapping democratic elections for judges and endorsed a “merit selection” system for the state. No surprise there – a top lawyer thinks lawyers should control who sits on the bench.

But unlike most proponents of secret selection, Chief Justice Magnuson deserves credit for his refreshing honesty about his reasons: voters, he believes, simply don’t have a sufficient level of “insight and sophistication” to evaluate judicial decisions and he doesn’t think “anybody” should just be able to “walk into a voting booth with no idea what they’re doing.”

As Chief Justice Magnuson no doubt knows, literacy tests for voting were outlawed with the Voting Right Act of 1965, legislation later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. But maybe Minnesota could pass a law forbidding any citizen without a college degree from voting in a judicial election. Or maybe they could restrict voting to only those with a J.D. Come to think of it, most people don’t know much about their school board elections either. So maybe only teachers should be allowed to vote in these races. And my guess is about half of all Americans voting in any given presidential election think the other half just “walk into a voting booth with no idea what they’re doing.” Hmmmm…

Here are the direct quotes, but you can read the whole interview in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

“I would rather have the help of knowledgeable people evaluating the judges, and then, in a nonpartisan way, saying here’s where they stand, than to have anybody walk into the voting booth with no idea what they’re doing.”

“It’s nonsensical to think you can boil down a decision to a sound bite that is meaningful to the public. You need to have a certain level of experience and insight and sophistication to be able to say that judge got that right.