SAN DIEGO COUNTY ELECTIONS : Appeal Judge Won Retention While Far From the Fray

Facing the people’s vote in the midst of the most heated judicial retention election in memory, Justice Edward T. Butler of the 4th District Court of Appeal devised an uncharacteristically judicious campaign strategy.

He left the country.

While California Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird was taking to the tube to appeal for support, Butler was touring India. While Associate Justices Cruz Reynoso and Joseph Grodin were stumping the state, Butler was sightseeing in Thailand and Nepal.

And while the three Supreme Court judges were losing their jobs Tuesday night, Butler--just home from what he termed “a marvelous trip”--was comfortably hanging onto his.

“My total silence during the weeks of the campaign redounded to my considerable benefit,” the usually voluble justice said.

Butler--a former San Diego city attorney, mayoral candidate and Superior Court judge before his appointment to the appellate bench by former Democratic Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr.--was alone among his 4th District brethren in owning up to a calculated strategy of lying low before the election.

But his colleagues in the court’s San Diego division who also faced a confirmation test, Presiding Justice Daniel J. Kremer and Justice Jerry J. Lewis, conceded Wednesday that they had not gone out of their way to call attention to their presence on the ballot.

“I didn’t go to India, but I never seriously considered any affirmative campaigning,” Kremer said.

“There is no strategy and there was no campaign,” Lewis added.

In contrast to the bitter, months-long campaign against Brown’s Supreme Court appointees, the former governor’s selections for the 4th District court did not draw opposition until the last weekend before the election.

On Saturday, households throughout Orange County received mailings from a group calling itself the “Non-Partisan Candidate Evaluation Council” urging “no” votes on the retention of Butler and four Brown appointees to the court’s Orange County division. Like a similar broadside opposing Brown appointees to the 2nd District court in Los Angeles, the leaflets listed no reasons for ousting the judges.

Despite the last-minute attack, all five targeted judges easily won retention. Presiding Justice John K. Trotter Jr. of the Orange County division said Wednesday that the judges’ average margin of victory--about 72-28--exceeded the majorities won by the court’s judges in 1982, when there was no organized opposition.

Lewis acknowledged that he and other judges worried that voters inclined to oust Bird might proceed to vote against all the judges on the ballot beneath her.

That did not occur. But voting overall did tail off as the electorate worked its way down the lengthy ballot. More than 66,000 voters who cast ballots for or against Kremer did not bother to vote at all on Butler’s retention.

Butler attributed his lower vote total to his higher level of public prominence and to voters’ disagreement with some of the positions he has taken as a judge.

Kremer had another explanation for his colleague’s lower vote count.

“The Indian votes haven’t come in yet,” he said.