As we head into Primary Day, thousands of New Yorkers in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan will encounter the frustrating ritual of being asked to choose between judicial candidates they’ve never heard of. Chalk it up to our state’s odd process for electing judges, a system that is overly complicated and dominated by Democratic and Republican party officials, who jealously guard New York’s last bastion of political patronage.

A handful of Civil Court judicial contests are on the ballot, and there’s a high-profile fight underway for Queens Surrogate, the judge in charge of handling wills and estates in the city’s second-largest borough. The Daily News editorial board has a helpful guide explaining some of the issues and candidate positions.

But the real action, which happens almost entirely behind the scenes, is the election of many of New York’s 300-plus Supreme Court justices who, despite their lofty title, do not occupy the state’s highest court but instead are the workhorses who hande the vast majority of the state’s legal disputes as front-line trial judges whose terms last 14 years. As required by law, voters nominate Supreme Court justices by voting for delegates to a judicial convention, a sparsely-attended post-primary meeting at which would-be judges get the party’s nod to appear on the ballot in November. Finalists blessed by the convention often appear, unopposed, on multiple party lines.

“The judicial conventions themselves are an empty exercise. More than 96 percent of the nominations are uncontested,” the New York Times editorial board complained back in 2007. “They often take, from beginning to end, as little as 20 minutes.”

It’s likely you won’t see any names on your ballot for judicial........

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