The Longest Part of Your Ballot: 60 Cook County Judges Ask to Keep Their Seats
Retention races make up most of a Cook County ballot and get skipped the most. This year 59 Circuit Court judges and one appellate justice need 60 percent yes votes — and the Chicago Bar Association found all 60 qualified.
The races most Cook County voters skip are the ones that fill most of the ballot. Sixty judges are asking voters to retain them on Tuesday — 59 from the Circuit Court of Cook County and one justice of the Illinois Appellate Court — and each must win at least 60 percent yes votes to stay on the bench. Retention is a straight up-or-down question on each judge, separate from the contested races for judicial vacancies.
Voters who want a verdict before they vote have two established guides. The Chicago Bar Association's Judicial Evaluation Committee, after its peer-review screening, recommends retaining all 60 — it found the appellate justice and every one of the 59 circuit judges 'Qualified' — and publishes its Judge Smart Pocket Guide in English, Spanish and Polish at chicagobar.org/votejudges, in a format voters can take into the booth. In the races for open seats, the same committee rated two candidates 'Highly Qualified', 22 'Qualified' and two 'Not Recommended', both of the last after declining to be screened.
Injustice Watch, the Chicago nonprofit newsroom that covers the Cook County courts, takes the other approach: no endorsements, but reporting on each candidate — past controversies, appointments, and bar ratings, positive and negative — in its guide at 2026retention.injusticewatch.org, with 3,000 print copies placed across 18 Southland municipalities. Countywide circuit seats are decided by the whole county; subcircuit seats only by that subcircuit's voters, across Cook County's 20 subcircuits. The homework takes minutes per judge — the terms at stake run six years.
