Well, GA is employment at will so, unless there’s some special law for judges I don’t know about, I’m guessing the ‘rejection’ is more symbolic than anything. My best guess is that he was about to be fired anyway and Kemp didn’t want him to get away with acting like it was on his own terms. It would be good to hear a lawyer’s take on it, though.

isnt forcing someone to go into work against their wishes just false imprisonment?

Probably something about resigning in grace rather than being fired in grief.

Isn’t judge an elected position? As a voter, I’d be pretty pissed if I voted for someone and there were no mechanisms in place to prevent them from going, “whoops, nevermind! Turns out this was not for me!” Like, I’m cool with them saying that and helping create a plan to step down, but we can’t just have elected officials abandoning posts, no matter how qualified or corrupt they are.

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Lot of derision but not much explanation as to how this strange system came to be.

Many state constitutions in the US were written in the 18th and 19th centuries. The key differences relevant here to this discussion were that during these times, suffrage was far more restricted, and communities were far more sparsely populated and isolated.

Prior to the 20th century, suffrage was not universal and generally was restricted to wealthy white men of status, who, as a consequence of their socioeconomic standing, also tended to be more educated and thus better suited to rationally judge the qualifications of office-seekers. A consequence of universal suffrage is that the education level of the average voter goes down.

Most Europeans severely underestimate how few people lived in these states and across how much land they occupied. The US typically granted statehood to its territories when they reached the mid to high five digits in population. The majority of Western states are the same size as the largest European countries. Let me use California as an illustrative example. Its statehood was granted in 1950 and it had a population of 92,597. So just imagine essentially a group of people fewer in number than a single small European city trying to run a piece of territory the size of Germany (California is actually bigger than Germany by 69,000 km²).

What happens in such a scenario is that communities become very isolated and insular. They get used to running their own affairs since basically any model of centralised government is going to fail when your population density is 0.2 people per km².

Understand that aside from tightly-knit indigenous communities (who were branded as “savages” and categorically excluded from participation in so-called “civilised” society) this was literally unsettled land. Empty plains, dry desert, and wild forest for hundreds of kilometres around where there was no law but those of physics.

In these isolated communities, you still need to fill the required leadership roles, but you run into the issue where nobody is particularly qualified to these offices and further still, the townsfolk don’t really want to just elect a single person to fill all the other offices by appointments. Rather the best way to fill these offices is by election where the community can get together and decide collectively who is best qualified for office. So how it would go is that everyone entitled to suffrage would, every other year, ride their horses into the county seat, which could take hours, and then listen to the candidates’ campaign pitches, vote for whomever they thought was the most qualified for sheriff and county judge, and then go home and never hear from those people again for months on end.

As a result, when these territories were granted statehood, most delegates to the conventions that wrote the state constitutions saw no reason to deviate from these established methods for picking local office-holders.

No. Bible belt USA coroners and medical examiners don’t even have to have medical degrees, and judges don’t need a juris doctor degree.

People are giving you somewhat bad information. This may differ in other states, but they do need to have practiced law in Georgia for seven years prior to being allowed to run for election.

Its a dumb system but not completely unregulated.

Other states have various methods of selecting judges. In Colorado, the governor appoints them for their first term, then they are subjected to a retention vote every few years. They rarely lose their retention votes.

It is dumb. It is to to states how they do it, but most of the times the state judges are selected via election. Which is tough as a voter it is very hard to learn about a judge especially if the judges supposed to be non partisan (believe in our not, but in some states they declare the part they are in).

IMO the governor should select judges and perhaps give option during election to allow people to recall them if they are grossly biased or something (at that point judge would be well known).

They do not (at least not here in Indiana). And you are correct, it is stupid.

“I hate my wife” cue laughtrack

Or maybe we can not make facetious comments about a suicide that literally just happened?

Editing this into all of my posts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines