With another election season upon us, we'll once again get to watch the awkward unfolding of that political riddle, the judicial campaigns.

Come primary and election days, voters will walk into their polling places and note, sometimes with surprise, an array of names of candidates for the bench. Often, particularly when the races are for the state Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court, many voters will have scant knowledge of the candidates. Many will skip those ballot lines altogether.

I've long thought this is an odd way to pick folks who will preside over our courtrooms, often ruling on arcane points of law and helping juries sort through the complexity of civil and criminal cases.

But I've never heard the case put quite so succinctly as by a British colleague N. C. Chief Justice Sarah Parker quoted the other day.

His assessment of our judicial elections was simply this: "It's absurd."

He and I are far from alone.

But then again, North Carolina is far from alone in bestowing judicial robes this way. Thirty-nine states elect some or all of their judges.

It's a process fraught with difficulty in part because judicial candidates are loath - and sometimes constrained - from discussing issues on which they might have to rule when on the bench. Voters' decisions may be based on popularity that has little bearing on legal knowledge. At times, pulling the voting lever may be based on nothing more than name recognition, a risk in every race magnified by the relative obscurity of most judicial races.

(At times, the motivation is even more disconcerting. In the early 1970s, a fire-extinguisher salesman won a Democratic primary over an experienced jurist who happened to be black.)

Granted, on the local level for district and superior court judges, our knowledge may be a little greater. But candidates in statewide contests for the higher courts are enigmatic to most voters.

Judges themselves frequently speak out against elections. Chief Justice Parker, speaking Wednesday to board members of the N. C. Press Association and some faculty and students form the UNC School of Journalism, cited the impact of judicial elections on the quality of the judiciary as one of the main challenges confronting the courts.

Earlier this month, at Elon University's School of Law, former U. S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor argued that appointing rather than electing judges would improve states' judicial systems.

"We are the only nation in the world that elects judges," O'Connor said. "We are just way out in left field on this."

And a couple of days later, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg echoed those remarks at a judicial conference in Washington. "If there's a reform I would make, it would be that," Ginsburg said during a question-and-answer session of the National Association of Women Judges, The Washington Post reported.

Other models certainly exist for selecting judges. There's the federal model, with executive appointments confirmed (or rejected) by the legislature. All of the 13 original states initially appointed judges, O'Connor noted in her Elon speech.

She engineered a change to appointive judgeships in Arizona in 1974. "The system has produced a really improved group of judges for the state," she said.

Some systems are a compromise, with original appointments subject to periodic voter reaffirmation or rejection of the judges. Often, a governor may fill a vacancy by appointment, although the judge subsequently will face the voters.

A novel idea that's been floated in North Carolina would call for a screening panel to recommend two candidates for appellate-level seats to the governor, who would appoint one. The unselected candidate subsequently could contest for the seat.

North Carolina in recent years has made important reforms in the election process, making races non-partisan, providing a public-funding option and producing a voters' guide for appellate races.

But the basic unsound system remains intact.

O'Connor at Elon, while noting those improvements, nonetheless voiced the hope that "someday you'll think about something else in North Carolina."

It's a hope worth sharing.

Bob Ashley is editor of The Herald-Sun. Contact him at (919) 419-6678 or by e-mail at bashley@heraldsun.com.