POPULAR election of judges is a great idea if you want to make sure the deep-pocketed special interests who underwrite their campaigns have an inside track in the courthouse.

It’s a great idea if you want judges to make the popular decisions instead of the legally and constitutionally correct decisions.

It’s a great idea if you want to dumb down the judiciary.

But if you want the best and brightest judges, or judges who do their best to rule as the law requires, whether the voters (or the judges themselves) like their decisions or not, it’s a bad idea.

It’s also a bad idea if you want to increase the number of African-Americans on the bench — which is the goal behind the current push to adopt such a system in South Carolina.

In South Carolina, we already have popular elections for probate judges. The result: While women fare quite well, African-Americans are elected even less frequently than they are appointed to the bench by the General Assembly.

Just two of the state’s 46 probate judges are black, or 4 percent. Half are women. That compares to 6 percent black and 17 percent female judges selected by the General Assembly.

“The common assumption is that elections are the only way that you can really achieve diversity on the bench, and I honestly don’t know where this assumption comes from,” said Rachel Paine Caufield, who works with the American Judicature Society, which promotes merit selection of judges. “I’ve never seen anything that demonstrates that that’s the case, but it’s a very common assumption.

“I look at some of the states, particularly small, progressive states that use merit selection, that are really over-represented in terms of diversity on the bench. People wonder how that happens, and the answer is really pretty easy: They form nominating commissions where race and gender representation is required on the commission, and it’s required in the candidates, and it’s required in the nominees. It really makes sense.”

South Carolina is hardly what you’d call a progressive state, so you can’t assume that we would include any diversity criteria if we changed to a true merit system. A merit system, in which the governor appoints judges from a list of candidates nominated by an independent commission, is what my colleagues and I support.

Even without diversity requirements, though, we know that governors in South Carolina have a much better record than the General Assembly when it comes to appointing African-Americans and women.

Gov. Mark Sanford, for example, has appointed two black men, one black woman and three white women to his 12-person Cabinet — that makes it 25 percent black and 33 percent female. Of the 578 board appointments he had made through early February, 15 percent were black, and 28 percent were female. His State House staff is 14 percent black, 7 percent Asian-Indian and half female. And among his executive policy directors, a third are black, and 58 percent are female.

Some national studies have found that merit selection increases diversity on the bench, some have found that it decreases diversity, and some have found that it makes no difference. A big reason for the contradictory findings, according to a 1999 review of the studies, is that states set up their merit systems so differently.

But there seems to be a consensus that gubernatorial appointment — which can either include the merit component or operate like the federal system, without a nominating commission — is pretty consistent at producing more diversity than popular election. And since the majority of judges in states with popular election first reach the bench through gubernatorial interim appointments, the election process does even less than it seems to diversify the bench.

Research shows that black candidates have made recent gains in judicial elections (although no more than they’ve made in appointment systems), but only when election districts are drawn with that goal in mind. Indeed, proponents of popular election in South Carolina seem to believe they’ll be able to gerrymander the 16 judicial circuits — from which only one black solicitor has been elected in modern times — to increase the number of black judges elected.

But that’s unrealistic.

To begin with, the U.S. Supreme Court has made it nearly impossible to draw election districts for the purpose of helping African-Americans get elected.

It’s possible that the Legislature could get away with abandoning the judicial circuits and electing judges from congressional or legislative districts, which are grandfathered in because they were drawn back when states were pretty much required to draw districts based on race. But it’s hard to imagine that a Legislature that doesn’t think electing more black judges should be a priority would do that. It’s even harder to imagine that a court would order the state to use those districts, which bear no relationship to judicial circuits.

What’s more likely, under a legislative plan or a court plan, is that we’d end up with judicial circuits that make it even less likely than it already is for African-Americans to become judges.

And we’d have a lousy judiciary, to boot.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.