According to information from members in both the Alabama Republican and Democratic parties, a firm was contracted to evaluate the recent Birmingham Bar Judicial Poll.
Birmingham, AL (PRWEB) November 04, 2012
The evaluation results, performed by Birmingham based firm, Chitwood Consultants, shows the Birmingham Bar Judicial results were “heavily skewed” and nothing more than a basic popularity contest.
“Only 687 out of more than 4,000 bar members answered this poll. That’s less than 17% of lawyers in Birmingham. This makes the validity of this poll at best ‘highly questionable’,” says Dr. Bill Chitwood, President of the firm.
The Birmingham Bar Association claims that their judicial poll helps voters determine which candidates are “highly qualified” and which candidates are “not qualified” to be a sitting Judge in Jefferson county. However, if you look at the results from the poll, most of the current sitting Judges received a “highly qualified” rating by a very small margin of the bar members (less than 15%).
“The bar poll is nothing more than a popularity contest that keeps the small click of Judges elected in Birmingham. Anyone who can look at numbers and understand basic math can see where current sitting Judges, or former Judges running again, received most of the votes. The question citizens of Jefferson county need to ask themselves is ‘Do they really want to trust trial lawyers to decide who should be on the bench presiding over their cases?’ It should be an obvious answer,” says Dr. Chitwood.
Members of the Birmingham Bar Association have declined to comment, but say that “they stand behind their poll and its validity.” After speaking with several Birmingham lawyers, under a condition of anonymity, we were told most of the lawyers do not vote in the Bar poll because it is considered to be “rude and unprofessional to talk about the qualifications of a fellow attorney, that is why we go to the polls to vote privately.”
For more information you can visit the Birmingham Bar website (http://www.birminghambar.org/) and click on the link for the poll results.
For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2012/11/prweb10091376.htm
This article (Birmingham Bar Judicial Poll Evaluated By Chitwood Consultants, Report Says “Heavily Skewed”) was originally developed by and is property of American Banking News. Checkout American Banking News for up-to-date banking news and peer to peer lending news.