OCR Text |
Show Vote for Amendment No, 1 Modernizes Utah Courts Recognizing the fact that voting on constitutional amendments ordinarily or-dinarily is light, the Utah Bar Association As-sociation today impressed on voters of this area the necessity of voting "Yes" on Amendment Number 1. This amendment empowers the Utah legislature to provide a new method in the state of selecting the district court and supreme court judges. M. C. Harris, Logan, president of the Utah Bar Association, presented pre-sented the case for the amendment in this way: 1 "This amendment seeks to remedy rem-edy Utah's present system of selecting se-lecting judges on partisan ballot during general election years. Let us take this election as a case in point. Although we are electing two justices for the Supreme Court and judges for our district courts, attention is centered largely on the presidential, the congressional and the gubernatorial candidates. The men seeking a place as judges, whether they are at present on the bench or seeking election to the bench, are receiving scant attention. atten-tion. . . , "The very nature of our judicial system demands lull consideration of fitness and ability of our. judges . . . a consideration not possible under the present Utah system. "The amendment Number 1 grants our legislature power to devise a new system for selecting judges. The amendment does not provide nor contemplate that judges judg-es be appointed. It does contemplate contem-plate removal of selection of the judiciary from partisan political ballot." , ' Mr. Harris pointed out that the amendment has the endorsement of both the Republicans and the Democratic Dem-ocratic state platforms, and the endorsement en-dorsement of all candidates for state office, including Governor Herbert B. Maw and J. Bracken Lee, Republican candidate for Governnr. ' ' |