“Exactly what are we waiting for?” the Reading Eagle asks of a switch from elections of appellate judges to merit selection in Pennsylvania.
The recent opinion piece champions the many reasons why merit selection makes sense:

Last year’s appellate court elections provided all the evidence anyone should need to realize that merit selection would be a far better way to pick jurists for the three highest courts in Pennsylvania.

The newspaper, which has been an advocate of merit selection for years, points out the uniqueness of having support from both sides of the aisle, including the last four governors of Pennsylvania – three Republicans and a Democrat:

There seems to be few proposals these days to gain true bipartisan support, so when one is put forth, it deserves serious consideration.

The piece also points out the soaring costs of judicial elections, calling the $4.7 million spent by the two candidates in the last Supreme Court race “a ridiculous amount of money for candidates who are prevented by judicial canons from actually conducting a campaign in any true sense of the word.”
The Superior Court and Commonwealth Court elections are also costly, and, despite the million raised, “gave voters little on which to base their selection other than part, home county and perhaps a campaign slogan or two.”
The article also quotes some figures from a recent Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts poll that 93 percent of people favored putting the issue of merit selection on a statewide ballot.
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves:

“Exactly what are we waiting for?”