24 Oct 2026, 8:45 a.m.
2026 NYC General Election: Judicial Candidates
Early voting in New York City starts in several minutes, today, Saturday, Oct. 24th. This is the second of a few blog posts I’m publishing sharing my research and thinking and making endorsements. In this post I cover judicial candidates.
In this post, I cover all eleven competitive races across the city this election (more candidates than seats), with 41 candidates total. I think all of these are also in the Times-Union’s list of races; they also, handily, link to each candidate’s website and New York State Board of Elections campaign finance info. There are also 15 non-competitive races, with 25 candidates total. I mention but did not research these, but Soft Power Vote makes recommendations for every single race in New York City, which is a staggering task that they've done in every election since 2020. They post to Instagram (viewable through Imginn proxy) and Substack, and they'll publish today, I believe.
This isn’t as thorough as I’d like for a few reasons. I had a minor injury this week; I was waiting for the Bar Associations to publish their evaluations to help me make choices in some races, and some of the Bar Associations still haven’t released them; and I wound up on a bit of a wild goose chase around candidates’ financial disclosures, as I’ll explain.
So: this is going to be messier, more bullet-point-y and less prose-y, and more of a living document than usual. If you need to vote this weekend (Saturday or Sunday, October 24 or 25), here’s what I have. After I hit Post, I'll fix up some formatting to make it easier to navigate. Monday, the LGBT bar association will publish its evaluations and I’ll add those. I don’t know whether Brooklyn Bar Association or Queens County Bar Association are doing evaluations at all this cycle; if so, I’ll add those when I get them.
And between now and Election Day, I may poke some more at candidates’ past political donations (searching past campaign contributions at the federal, state, and city levels), skim more of Scrutinize.org which provides analysis of sitting judges' records, get friends to read and summarize more paywalled articles I currently can’t read in the Brooklyn Eagle and the New York Law Journal, and request and read financial disclosures I don’t have yet. Please feel free to do some digging, especially along those lines, and leave info in the comments.
And: I am one volunteer and these are my personal recommendations. They aren't the endorsements of the local Indivisible chapter, or the other people who help sit at my weekly outreach table, or anyone but me. Please feel free to leave links to other good resources in the comments - or your own thoughts, including disagreement or corrections, as long as you're being productive and not just insulting or dismissive.
The New York State Unified Court System has a rule that "Judicial Candidates for elective positions must file a Financial Disclosure Statement for Judicial Candidates within 20 days of becoming a candidate" with NYS UCS’s Ethics Commission, covering the previous calendar year. And those are available for public inspection upon request; the Ethics Commission redacts a little private info before providing them.
So, last week, I emailed and requested the disclosure forms for all 41 of those candidates in competitive races. Then, this week, the Commission only gave me statements for 12 of them, saying of the other 29, “The Ethics Commission does not have financial disclosure statements for the following judicial candidates you requested”.
But that doesn’t mean they didn’t file!
UCS employees, such as judges, have to file a yearly financial disclosure whether or not they’re running for anything. And UCS chases them down for it if they don’t file in time, with a “Notice of Delinquency” and eventually putting their name on a list of delinquent filers. (In contrast, the Ethics Commission isn’t hooked up to the county and state Boards of Elections, so they don’t have a list of candidates who are on the hook to file a financial disclosure, so the Ethics Commission can’t send them reminders.) If a judicial candidate already works for UCS and filed through that system, they don't have to file a fresh disclosure as a candidate: "compliance ... shall not be necessary where a judge or non-judge already is or was required to file a financial disclosure statement for the preceding calendar year pursuant to Part 40..."
It took me way too long (including multiple conversations with the Ethics Commission, and looking at patterns in the PDFs I’d been given) to figure out that the Ethics Commission had only looked people’s names up in one of their systems and not the other. Judicial candidates have to send in the statement on paper; UCS employees file it using an electronic system. The Commission hadn’t sent me any of the financial disclosures that candidates who are judges, law clerks, etc. had filled out as court employees. On Thursday, I verified this by spot-checking one of the 29: I filled out a new form and requested the financial disclosure statement that Lola Waterman, a judge in Kings County Family Court, had filed. And indeed, the Ethics Commission sent it to me straightaway.
So, my current assumption is: if someone on that list of 29 works for UCS, they almost certainly have filed the disclosure. But if they don’t work for the courts, then they never filed it, which makes them a scofflaw. And for me that counts against someone’s candidacy.
(“New York County”)
Competitive: Justice of the Supreme Court - 1st Judicial District [all of Manhattan], # to be elected: 6
11 candidates:
Judge of the Civil Court - County - New York, # to be elected: 3
Judge of the Civil Court ‑ District ‑ 1st Municipal Court District - New York, # to be elected: 1
Judge of the Civil Court ‑ District ‑ 3rd Municipal Court District - New York, # to be elected: 1
Judge of the Civil Court ‑ District ‑ 4th Municipal Court District - New York, # to be elected: 1
Judge of the Civil Court ‑ District ‑ 7th Municipal Court District - New York, # to be elected: 4
Judge of the Civil Court ‑ District ‑ 9th Municipal Court District - New York, # to be elected: 2
Justice of the Supreme Court - 12th Judicial District [all of Bronx County], # to be elected: 1
Judge of the Civil Court - District - 1st Municipal Court District - Bronx, # to be elected: 1
Judge of the Civil Court - District - 2nd Municipal Court District - Bronx, # to be elected: 1
(“Kings County”)
Competitive: Justice of the Supreme Court - 2nd Judicial District [all of Kings County], # to be elected: 4
Judge of the Civil Court - County - Kings, # to be elected: 4
Judge of the Civil Court - District - 2nd Municipal Court District - Kings, # to be elected: 1
Judge of the Civil Court - District - 3rd Municipal Court District - Kings, # to be elected: 1
Competitive: Judge of the Civil Court - District - 4th Municipal Court District - Kings, # to be elected: 2
Judge of the Civil Court - District - 6th Municipal Court District - Kings, # to be elected: 2
Judge of the Civil Court - District - 7th Municipal Court District - Kings, # to be elected: 1
Competitive: Judge of the Civil Court - District - 8th Municipal Court District - Kings, # to be elected: 1
Overview: “Who is running to be a judge in Queens?” Jacob Kaye, Queens Eagle, Oct. 23, 2026
You can meet a few of these candidates next week! On Wed. Oct. 28th, 7:30pm, the JFK Democratic Club will host a few speakers at Community United Methodist Church, 81-10 35th Ave. in Jackson Heights, Queens. Meetings usually last about 90 minutes. Scheduled speakers include:
Competitive: Justice of the Supreme Court - 11th Judicial District [all of Queens County], # to be elected: 3. Democrats profiled in this Aug. 11th piece.
Competitive: Judge of the Civil Court - County - Queens, # to be elected: 3