The Judicial Nominating Commission will conduct interviews for the Oklahoma Supreme Court vacancy on March 11, 2025. Click here to urge your state legislators to demand three good candidates be sent to Governor Stitt.

According to a press release issued by the Judicial Nominating Commission (JNC) on February 4, 2025, the JNC plans to conduct its interviews for the position of Oklahoma Supreme Court Justice on March 11, 2025. The JNC began accepting applications last year and there were originally 14 applicants. Since that time, one applicant has decided to withdraw from consideration.

Because the JNC is not subject to the Open Meetings Act or the Open Records Act, it can be difficult to know how the meeting will be conducted or how its members will conduct the vote. Concerned citizens can look to two resources to provide a peek into the process. The first is the rules set by the JNC itself. Although the rules have no enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance, they are the best thing the public has to assess the process. The second resource is a House interim study held last October. 

To begin with, the JNC’s rules prohibit commissioners from committing themselves to a certain applicant. Neither can the commissioners lobby other members to vote for a certain candidate, but they may ask for other commissioners’ opinions about a particular candidate. Prior to the meeting, commissioners are to disclose any conflict of interest they may have, but it is up to individual commissioners to disqualify themselves if they feel like their partiality could be in question. 

With respect to the actual voting, the rules state that commissioners may not vote for any candidate unless the commissioner is there for all candidate interviews (absent undefined exigent circumstances). In the event a commissioner cannot attend all interviews, the other commissioners will vote on whether that commissioner may vote on the applications for that position. 

All those commissioners who are able to vote will vote immediately after the interviews are concluded. According to the rules, this is done to “foster Commissioner independence and impartiality.” What’s interesting is that the rules specifically state that the vote is to occur before any group discussion of the candidates. 

The commissioners vote (anonymously) and the votes for each candidate are tallied. In order to be sent on to the governor, a candidate must get a majority of votes from the commissioners present at the meeting. In the October interim study, Jim Webb—a former chairman of the JNC—explained that each commissioner writes three names on a piece of paper. With a crowded field, it’s certainly possible that more than three names would get a majority of the present members. This is when the JNC would actually deliberate and have some discussion.

Interestingly, Webb suggested that this scenario rarely plays out. According to him, in the majority of the cases, the JNC would have selected the three names within three minutes of finishing the last interview. Occasionally, a tiebreaker vote would be needed, but he did not recall a single time when voting took more than 15 to 20 minutes. Another speaker echoed Webb’s comments that they voted with “no discussion” and almost always came out with the top three candidates on the first vote. Everyone can draw their own conclusions from these comments.

Finally, the public can expect to be kept in the dark regarding the voting. As noted above, the voting is anonymous. But at the interim study, multiple presenters argued against making the vote totals subject to disclosure. One presenter suggested it may deter a good candidate, who just isn’t quite ready, from applying again if he found out he didn’t receive any votes. Webb piggybacked on that and suggested a sitting judge may get no votes, requiring the lawyer commissioners to recuse in any future case before that judge. 

That’s a peek into the JNC process—as far as the public knows. We’ll never know if the commissioners ask questions about statutory interpretation or what constitutes judicial overreach. And, similar to the governor, we’ll find out who the three nominations are through a press release without any indication of who voted for whom. This is the “deliberative” process that political insiders have fought so hard to preserve.