Judicial elections also directly introduce lobbying into the judicial branch. Successful judges now have to pay for their campaigns and more money tends to equal more success in elections.
How judges get picked is a huge issue that most of the population have no education in. Having them selected by the populace leads simply to judges that enormously punitive. The population as a whole believes that criminals should be destroyed/deleted from society, and the judges that can deliver that are the ones that get elected.
This generally means very-police-friendly judges that will issue warrants without any cause, and will deny any attempts to later fight the illegality. These judges then move up to the appeals courts and support the same policies by the friends they left behind in the lower courts.
I do prefer appointments for judges, and I prefer those appointments to expire after the elected official's term would end. I believe typically this is 4 years for elected and 6 for appointed.
