December 12, 2024
State | Northwest Herald
State

Judge Karmeier keeps Illinois Supreme Court seat

By JIM SUHR

Illinois Supreme Court Justice Lloyd Karmeier questions an attorney during oral arguments Sept. 10, 2013, in Chicago. The justice will keep his seat by a slim margin of victory after he was targeted in a campaign to keep him from retaining the position. The Illinois State Board of Elections posted official vote totals Monday for Justice Karmeier of Washington County and he received support from 60.77 percent of voters. Karmeier needed at least 60 percent support to be retained. (AP file)

ST. LOUIS – An Illinois Supreme Court justice who narrowly fended off a million-dollar campaign to deny him retention said Tuesday that the ordeal merits rethinking how judicial elections are decided.

Illinois State Board of Elections vote totals posted Monday for last month’s elections show Lloyd Karmeier, of southern Illinois’ Washington County, received 60.77 percent of the vote.

That passed the 60 percent threshold he needed to keep the seat he won a decade ago after a tight race that cost the two candidates more than $9 million, shattering state and national spending records for a judicial seat.

Karmeier, 74, was sworn in to second 10-year term Monday.

Several attorneys and law firms in the runup to last month’s elections had sought to oust Karmeier from his seat in the district comprised of the 37 southernmost Illinois counties, spending more than $1 million on a multimedia campaign that portrayed the justice as partial to big business.

Karmeier told The Associated Press on Tuesday that requiring judges to get 60 percent of the vote to win retention makes them unfairly vulnerable to influences of special-interest groups bent on unseating them, punctuating “the need for changes” to that process.

In most elections, he said, candidates who amass more than 60 percent of the vote would consider that a convincing victory, although in statewide judicial retention races “60 percent allows the minority to remove an otherwise qualified judge.”

“That fact that you need a 60-percent plurality indicates that a small group could affect the election,” he said, noting he weathered an “overwhelmingly negative campaign no one should be subjected to.”

“Certainly this election gives me some incentive to work with others in the system to look at changes because of the emphasis of an unprecedented amount of money to [unsuccessfully] remove me from office,” he said. “This could happen to any judge.”