2026 California judges guide: Justices Kelli Evans, Joshua Groban and 62 appeals court justices face yes-or-no votes

California's ballot ends with a set of yes-or-no questions on judges, and this year there are 64 of them. Two reach every voter in the state: whether to keep Supreme Court Justices Kelli M. Evans and Joshua P. Groban. The other 62 are Court of Appeal justices, and each voter sees only the ones for their own appellate district, between five and 18 names depending on where they live. None of the 64 has an opponent. The certified list of candidates phrases each question the same way: "Shall Associate Justice of the Supreme Court KELLI M. EVANS be elected to the office for the term provided by law?"

The questions sit below the statewide races covered in our candidates master guide and the 14 propositions in our propositions master guide, and they are the part of the ballot that gets the least attention. In 2022, between 2.4 million and 2.8 million of the 11.1 million Californians who cast a ballot left each Supreme Court question blank, by our count from the Secretary of State's Statement of Vote. This guide explains what the vote does, who the justices are, why a police union is campaigning against Justice Evans, and how Californians have answered these questions in every election since 1986. For polling hours, drop-off sites and the count timeline, see our voting master guide. Our 2026 California ballot cheat sheet puts every proposition and statewide race on one page, with a printable PDF.

California's judicial retention vote is a yes-or-no question with no opponent on the ballot:

The rules come from Article VI, Section 16 of the California Constitution. Supreme Court justices "shall be elected at large and judges of courts of appeal shall be elected in their districts at general elections at the same time and places as the Governor," the Constitution says. Terms are 12 years, "beginning the Monday after January 1 following their election," which this time is January 4, 2027.

A justice does not run against anyone. Under subdivision (d), a sitting justice files a declaration of candidacy, and "only the candidate so declared or nominated may appear on the ballot, which shall present the question whether the candidate shall be elected." The threshold is a simple majority: "The candidate shall be elected upon receiving a majority of the votes on the question." Blank votes do not count against a justice.

The official voter guide, whose wording is prescribed by Elections Code section 9083, describes how a justice gets to the ballot in the first place:

1. The governor sends a candidate's name to the State Bar's Judicial Nominees Evaluation Commission, which "conducts a thorough review of the candidate's background and qualifications, with community input."
2. The governor nominates the candidate.
3. The Commission on Judicial Appointments, made up of "the Chief Justice of California, the Attorney General of California, and a senior Presiding Justice of the Courts of Appeal," holds a public hearing and must "confirm or reject the nomination."
4. A confirmed justice "is subject to voter approval at the next gubernatorial election, and thereafter at the conclusion of each term."

The offices are nonpartisan, and no party label appears next to a justice's name.

A "no" majority removes the justice and hands the seat back to the governor:

A justice who falls short of a majority leaves office when the current term ends, and the seat becomes a vacancy. Section 16(d)(2) says "The Governor shall fill vacancies in those courts by appointment," effective "when confirmed by the Commission on Judicial Appointments." The appointee then faces voters at the next gubernatorial election. The Constitution adds one restriction on the justice who lost:

"A candidate not elected may not be appointed to that court but later may be nominated and elected."
California Constitution, Article VI, Section 16(d)(1)

In practice a "no" majority on Justice Evans or Justice Groban would give the next governor, Xavier Becerra or Steve Hilton, a Supreme Court appointment on taking office in January 2027.

Justice Kelli Evans and Justice Joshua Groban are the two Supreme Court names on every California ballot:

The Supreme Court has seven seats. Four sitting justices are not on this ballot because their terms run past 2026: Justices Carol Corrigan and Leondra Kruger were retained in 2018, and Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero and Justice Goodwin Liu in 2022. The seventh seat is vacant (more on that below). Both seats on this ballot carry a full 12-year term that begins January 4, 2027 and runs to January 2039.

Kelli M. Evans joined the court in January 2023 as Governor Newsom's nominee:

Governor Gavin Newsom nominated Evans on August 10, 2022, the same day he named Patricia Guerrero as Chief Justice, "to fill the vacancy created by Justice Guerrero's elevation," the courts' newsroom reported. The Commission on Judicial Appointments (Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, Attorney General Rob Bonta and Presiding Justice Manuel Ramirez) confirmed her by a unanimous vote on November 10, 2022, after the November 2022 election. She took her seat in January 2023, so this is her first appearance on a ballot.

Her statement of qualifications in the voter guide lists an Alameda County Superior Court judgeship (2021–2022), chief deputy legal affairs secretary to Governor Newsom (2019–2021), special assistant attorney general at the California Department of Justice (2017–2019), senior director at the State Bar (2014–2017), staff attorney and associate director at the ACLU of Northern California, senior trial attorney in the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, and an assistant public defender in Sacramento County. She was admitted to the bar in 1994 after UC Davis School of Law and Stanford. The court's biography adds that she served on federal court-appointed monitoring teams for the Oakland and Cleveland police departments.

Joshua P. Groban joined the court in January 2019 and won 68.0% in his 2022 retention vote:

Governor Jerry Brown selected Groban on November 14, 2018, for the seat vacated by Justice Kathryn Werdegar's retirement. The commission confirmed him unanimously on December 21, 2018, and Brown swore him in on January 3, 2019, in the final days of the governor's term. Groban had been Brown's senior advisor since 2011 and, according to the court's biography, "advised the governor on the appointment of over 600 judges, or roughly one out of every three judges in the state." Before that he practiced at Paul, Weiss and at Munger, Tolles & Olson, and he taught appellate practice at UCLA School of Law. He is a Stanford and Harvard Law graduate, admitted to the bar in 1998.

Groban has faced voters once. In November 2022 he was retained for the remainder of Werdegar's term with 5,664,354 yes votes to 2,661,668 no, 68.0% to 32.0%, according to the Statement of Vote. The other three justices on that ballot ran between 69.3% and 70.9%. This year he is asking for a full 12-year term.

The seventh seat on the Supreme Court is vacant and stays off this ballot:

Justice Martin Jenkins, a Newsom appointee, announced his retirement on October 9, 2025 and left at the end of that month; the court's roster of past and present justices lists his tenure as December 2020 to October 2025. As of November 3, 2026 the court's Justices of the Court page still shows the seat as "Vacant Seat," and no nominee has been announced. The court is sitting with six justices.

Whoever Newsom nominates will go through the same State Bar evaluation and Commission on Judicial Appointments hearing and, if confirmed, will hold the seat until the next gubernatorial election in 2030 before facing voters. Nothing on this ballot affects that seat.

PORAC's police union PAC is campaigning for a "no" vote on Justice Evans:

One of the two Supreme Court questions has an organized opponent. The Peace Officers Research Association of California PAC, the political arm of what CalMatters describes as the state's largest law enforcement union, launched a website and digital ads under the name No on Kelli Evans; the site's disclosure line reads "Ad paid for by Peace Officers Research Association of California PAC (PORAC PAC)." PORAC describes itself there as "representing nearly 90,000 public safety professionals spanning every county."

The campaign's central claim is that "in a single year on the California Supreme Court, Justice Evans went on record 63 times to reopen sometimes unspeakable criminal cases that juries and appeals courts had already decided and upheld," against "zero times" for the Chief Justice. The site names four matters: People v. Gray (a 1981 Los Angeles County murder, in which it says Evans wrote that the outcome may be a "miscarriage of justice"), People v. Grandberry and People v. Chang (votes to grant review in April and June 2026), and LAPPL v. City of Los Angeles (a 2025 ruling striking down a law that warned complainants they could be prosecuted for knowingly false misconduct complaints against officers). It also says "Five of her six colleagues earned the State Bar's top rating; she didn't," and carries a statement from Crime Victims United founder Harriet Salarno urging a no vote. These are the campaign's claims; California Today has not independently reviewed the four cases or the State Bar evaluations.

The "63" is a real number with a specific meaning. It comes from the appellate firm Horvitz & Levy's annual count of dissents from the court's decisions not to hear a case. In the 2024–25 term, At the Lectern counted 159 such dissenting votes in 98 cases. Justice Liu recorded the most, 69 (68 in criminal cases). Evans recorded 63, all in criminal cases, and joined Liu in 53 of them. Groban recorded 22 (10 criminal, 12 civil). Corrigan and Kruger recorded two each, Jenkins one and Chief Justice Guerrero none. A dissent from a denial of review is a vote to hear a case the majority declined to hear, not a ruling that reopens it. The same source published a response on October 31 arguing the record does not justify a no vote.

CalMatters reported on October 31 that PORAC vice president Ben Therriault called the effort "a warning shot," that union leaders acknowledged it is unlikely to persuade enough voters to remove Evans, and that Evans declined to comment. No campaign against Justice Groban has surfaced, and neither PPIC nor the Berkeley IGS poll asks about the retention questions, so there is no public polling on either justice.

Every Supreme Court retention question since 1986 has passed, 29 in a row:

The last time Californians removed a justice was November 4, 1986, when a campaign over death penalty rulings defeated Chief Justice Rose Bird and Justices Cruz Reynoso and Joseph Grodin. The Secretary of State's Statement of Vote for that election records 33.84% yes for Bird, 39.76% for Reynoso and 43.39% for Grodin, while the three other justices on the same ballot, Stanley Mosk, Malcolm Lucas and Edward Panelli, were retained with 73.58%, 79.50% and 78.69%. Their seats were filled by appointment, as the Constitution's vacancy rule provides: by the 1990 election, Lucas had become Chief Justice and the ballot carried three associate justices who had not been on it in 1986, Armand Arabian, Marvin Baxter and Joyce Kennard.

Since then the question has been asked 29 more times across nine gubernatorial elections, and every answer has been yes. California Today compiled each result from the Secretary of State's Statements of Vote for 1990, 1994, 1998, 2002, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022. The closest call was Justice Armand Arabian's 55.77% in 1990, four years after the Bird campaign, and the 1994 ballot was the only other one where any justice fell below 60% (Ronald George 57.02%, Joyce Kennard 58.67%, Kathryn Werdegar 61.34%). Every result since 1998 has been between 65.5% and 75.9%.

Court of Appeal justices have a similar record on the same ballots. In 2022, for example, the nine First District justices on the ballot drew between 77.6% and 80.8% yes, higher than any Supreme Court justice that year, according to the same Statement of Vote.

Voters see the Court of Appeal justices for their own district only, 62 across six districts:

The Court of Appeal is organized into six districts, and the certified list assigns each district's questions to its counties. A Los Angeles voter sees 18 names from the Second District; a Fresno voter sees six from the Fifth; a Santa Clara voter sees five from the Sixth. The six district pages of the voter guide carry the same 62 names with links to each justice's biography. The table lists every justice on the ballot, in ballot order, with the county list for each district.

Court of Appeal justices on the November 3, 2026 ballot, by district:

Three names on the appellate list are judges who will not join the Court of Appeal until January 4, 2027:

Sixty-two questions, but three of the people are not appellate justices yet. The certified list identifies them by their current posts rather than as justices: David B. Sapp (Third District, no title), San Diego County Superior Court Judge Lisa Rodriguez (Fourth District, Division One) and Superior Court Judge Frederick S. Chung (Sixth District). All three were nominated by Governor Newsom to seats whose current holders are leaving when their terms end, and the Commission on Judicial Appointments confirmed Sapp and Chung on August 19, 2026 and Rodriguez on August 20, each "subject to voter confirmation" in November. Sapp, the governor's legal affairs secretary, takes the seat Justice Ronald Robie is leaving; Chung, a Santa Clara County judge since 2018, takes Justice Adrienne Grover's seat, with a term that "begins Jan. 4, 2027," the Sixth District announced; Rodriguez, a San Diego judge, takes Justice Terry O'Rourke's seat. For these three the ballot question is effectively an election to a first term.

Three other justices confirmed in the same August hearings are also on the ballot, each listed as "subject to voter confirmation" in the commission's announcements: Lauri Damrell (Third), Rashida Adams (as presiding justice, Second District, Division Three) and Juliet Macaulay (Fourth, Division Three). Two August confirmees, Marsha Amin (Fourth, Division One) and Denise Hippach (Second, Division Six), fill mid-term vacancies and will not face voters until 2030. The commission's next hearing, on November 16, will consider two more First District nominees, Brian Goldman and Adam Hofmann, according to the hearing notice; neither is on this ballot.

California's judicial retention results arrive after November 3 with the rest of the count:

Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. on November 3, and anyone in line at 8 p.m. can vote. The judicial questions are counted with everything else, so the first numbers appear after 8 p.m. Pacific and the Secretary of State's semi-official count runs until certification on December 11; our voting master guide has the full timeline. For Evans and Groban the number to watch is the yes share against 50%; a result anywhere in the historical band of 56% to 80% means a 12-year term starting January 4, 2027. A majority no on either would be the first since 1986 and would give the incoming governor a Supreme Court appointment, on top of the vacant seventh seat that Governor Newsom can still fill before he leaves office on January 4.