The Kansas Commission on Judicial Performance is providing a great service for Kansas voters.

In judicial districts, like Douglas County, whose judges are nominated by a local commission and appointed by the governor, voters’ only direct oversight is to decide whether those judges should be retained in office every four years. Unless they have had some personal dealings with a judge, voters often have had little or no information on which to base their retention votes.

The judicial performance commission, established in 2006, is a laudable effort to provide feedback both to judges and to voters about judges’ performance on the bench. Through surveys sent to attorneys who have appeared before the judges, as well as to non-attorneys who’ve had dealings with the judges, the commission provides a fair picture of what kind of job the judges are doing. In fact, the objective results of the survey provide a much better job evaluation than voters have for most of the officials they elect at the local, state and federal level.

Both attorneys and nonattorneys are asked to judge the judges on a wide variety of issues from their knowledge of the law to whether they treat everyone in their courtrooms with respect. Appellate judges also are asked to grade judges’ overall performance. Judges are asked to identify their own strengths and weaknesses, and their responses are included in a biographical sketch on the commission’s Web site.

The commission summarizes the positive and negative responses to the surveys conducted by an independent firm but also breaks down responses to each question asked in the survey. The summary may be as much as many voters need to make a decision, but the additional data available on each judge at www.kansasjudicialperformance.org leaves no stone unturned.

The surveys do double duty by informing voters and also giving judges feedback on their own performance, perhaps suggesting areas in which they might improve. The anonymous nature of the surveys allows the feedback to be honest and candid. While it’s true that many respondents might give judges the benefit of the doubt when scoring their performance, there’s little doubt that any judge who was consistently performing poorly would be identified for voters.

Even conscientious voters often have been stymied by the judge retention questions on their ballots, but that no longer needs to be the case. They can take the advice of the Kansas Commission on Judicial Performance on whom to retain or they can dig into the surveys and make up their own minds. Either way, the information provided by this new commission is a great step to help ensure the professionalism and integrity of the state’s judiciary.