Enough dirt has been thrown back and forth between the rival camps of incumbent Justice Louis Butler and challenger Michael Gableman to soil the entire state.

You may also feel ill-prepared to cast a ballot.

Offensive, misleading and downright inaccurate charges have so obscured the meaningful evidence that it has become difficult to determine who is the better candidate.

That's why the Wisconsin State Journal editorial board makes no endorsement in the Supreme Court race.

Instead of endorsing a candidate, the State Journal endorses a better method of choosing state Supreme Court justices -- a method called merit selection.

The mud-slinging mess of this spring 's Supreme Court race is rooted in a fundamental problem with the election of Supreme Court justices.

Elections are supposed to reflect the will of the majority. But Supreme Court justices, as guardians of our constitutional freedoms, are supposed to serve as a check on the will of the majority to ensure that the rights of the minority are not trampled.

When justices confront the prevailing political winds generated by elections, they encounter conflicts with their obligation to remain impartial and true to the law.

The nation 's founding fathers foresaw those conflicts when they decided against electing U.S. Supreme Court justices.

The consequences of electing Supreme Court justices have finally caught up to Wisconsin. The Butler-Gableman campaign, like last year 's campaign that yielded Justice Annette Ziegler 's victory over Linda Clifford, is an example.

In both races, well-financed groups poured money into ads to back their favorite candidates.

If you think these groups are spending their money to obtain the best, impartial justice for Wisconsin, think again. Their aim is to elect justices partial to the groups ' political points of view.

They accomplish their aim by swaying the majority will. All too often they employ deliberately misleading ads to do so.

A pro-Gableman group was forced to revise misstatements in an ad accusing Butler of being soft on crime.

A watchdog committee scolded a pro-Butler group for an ad unfairly accusing Gableman of taking too long to decide cases.

Justice should be blind. But voters should not be blinded by misinformation.

The influence of these groups extends even further, to the qualities a candidate needs to run for the Supreme Court.

Today, candidates with valuable credentials in the law may be left by the wayside if they do not also have the ability and ambition to raise large amounts of money for campaign war chests and to withstand highly politicized and often ugly campaigns.

These new qualifications raise their own risks. The money-raising process connects the candidates to interest groups in ways that may taint the candidates ' abilities to consider cases impartially.

There has to be a better way to pick Supreme Court justices.

Indeed, there is. Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia have already turned to merit selection to choose justices for their highest courts.

Wisconsin should make the same turn.

Advantages of merit selection

Good merit selection systems choose justices by their qualifications rather than by their ability to raise money and their expertise at waging campaigns.

Under the best forms of merit selection, an independent committee of lawyers and non-lawyers is chosen by a variety of non-political and political sources. The committee seeks out and reviews candidates, evaluating them according to competence, impartiality and fairness.

The committee recommends a short list of finalists to the governor or another appointing authority, who is required to make the appointment from the list, which is made public.

Justices are held accountable for their performance in one of two ways. Either the selection committee conducts periodic re-evaluations with the right to remove a poor-performing justice, or voters decide if the justice should be retained in an up-or-down, uncontested election at the end of the term.

The process better assures impartial justice and restores public trust in the courts.