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Two thirds of courthouse elections had no opponent

Across 6,358 elections for prosecutor, judge, and sheriff in 45 states in 2022 and 2024, 4,240 had no opponent on the ballot. That is two in three races for offices that decide charges, rule on bail and custody, and run local jails. The median uncontested single-seat race drew 16,520 votes.

Commonwealth’s Attorney Vote for one

The incumbent Unopposed

No candidate filed

What 4,240 of these ballots looked like. Counted from certified precinct returns published by the MIT Election Data and Science Lab for 2022 and 2024.

A national count requires combining precinct returns that states publish in different formats. Contest Every Race and BallotReady publish partial counts of uncontested elections; neither provides the courthouse breakdown examined here.

Prosecutors were the least contested office

Share of general-election races with no opponent on the ballot, 2022 and 2024 combined. The three groups are mutually exclusive and sum to the total.

The uncontested share rose between 2022 and 2024

The uncontested share rose from 61.8% in 2022 to 71.4% in 2024, nearly ten percentage points. Each year included more than three thousand races. These are the only two cycles available in the source, so the comparison does not establish a longer-term trend.

Uncontested races included large electorates

Among single-seat races, where the vote total measures votes cast in the contest, the median uncontested courthouse race drew 16,520 votes. Nine in ten drew more than a thousand, and forty-nine drew more than a million.

Large uncontested races included Washington Supreme Court seats. In November 2024 Steve González, then the sitting chief justice of Washington, was returned to the bench with no opponent on the ballot. Washington’s own certified results record 2,564,372 votes for him and 61,866 write-ins — 97.6% of everything cast. On the same ballot, Justice Sheryl Gordon McCloud was returned the same way on 2,534,783 votes. The third seat up that year, Position 2, was contested, and it was decided by about twenty-one thousand votes.

Source: Washington Secretary of State, certified November 2024 results. Washington's judicial elections are nonpartisan.

One of the smallest races was in West Almond, in Allegany County, New York, the 2024 contest for town justice drew 130 votes. The justice took 103 of them. The remaining 27 were write-ins, and the county’s own results sheet lists them by name: one of the people written in for the office was Harriet Tubman.

The party difference was largest for sheriffs

Republicans won 71.1% of their 3,091 courthouse seats without an opponent. Democrats won 64.0% of their 1,340 seats that way. The difference varied substantially by office.

Republican sheriffs faced no opponent in about seven of ten elections, compared with fewer than half of Democratic sheriffs. Among prosecutors, the uncontested rate exceeded 80% for both parties.

Uncontested rates were similar for Republican and Democratic judges. Another 1,552 judicial seats, more than a third, carried no party label. The overall courthouse party gap therefore describes the bench poorly.

In a broader count of partisan offices, Contest Every Race, a Democratic organization, reported that Democrats did not compete in 51% of races in 2022, or 14,894 contests. Republicans left 14.5%, or 4,224, uncontested. These are the organization's published figures; we did not recompute them.

Candidate recruitment efforts

Contest Every Race, founded in 2018 inside the organising outfit Movement Labs, exists to find candidates for exactly these elections. Its published tally is 12,807 candidates recruited and 5,660 elected — a 44% win rate.

In December 2025 Texas Democrats recruited 104 candidates and filled every state and federal race on the 2026 ballot — the first full slate either party has managed in modern Texas history, with nine in ten of the recruits never having run for anything before.

Recruitment programs could use this courthouse count to identify offices that have repeatedly drawn no challenger.

Identifying uncontested seats in the returns

Civly consolidated the 2022 and 2024 certified returns into 50,684 race-level results covering all fifty states and the District of Columbia, then identified contests with no opponent on the ballot.

Across every office, not just the courthouse, 24,426 elections in those two cycles had no opponent — each one carrying the office, the district, the county and the name of whoever won it unchallenged. Of those, 973 seats drew no challenger in either cycle, and 6,047 were decided by fewer than a thousand votes. Civly uses these election results, linked to candidates, districts, and party, in its research reports and donor lists.

How this was counted

Source

Certified precinct-level returns published by the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, collected from state and county election officials, for 2022 and 2024. The lab’s method for standardising these returns is written up in Scientific Data, and the datasets are archived at the Harvard Dataverse. Pulled and recomputed 13 August 2026. Precinct rows were consolidated into 50,684 race-level results, of which 47,495 are contests between people rather than ballot questions, and 6,358 are the three offices examined here.

Which offices count

Judges include trial, appellate and supreme courts, magistrates, surrogates, probate and orphans’ courts and justices of the peace. Prosecutors include district attorneys, commonwealth’s and state’s attorneys, prosecuting attorneys and elected solicitors; where a title could belong to either, prosecuting wins, so Georgia’s State Court Solicitor is a prosecutor rather than a judge. Court clerks, registers and recorders are excluded — they are elected in the same building but do not decide cases. Two office names required manual review: Kentucky’s county judge executive is a county administrator, not a judge, and the town of Courtland, Virginia returns a town council whose name contains the word “court”.

What “no opponent” means

No more names were printed on the ballot than there were seats to fill. Write-in votes count towards turnout but are not treated as an opponent — several states record every person written in, so an unopposed sheriff can otherwise appear to face hundreds of “candidates” on one or two votes each. The West Almond write-in for Harriet Tubman illustrates this classification issue.

Seats and races are different counts

A few benches elect several judges in one contest, so 6,358 races produced 6,493 winners. Party figures count winners, one per seat. Of the 4,240 races with no opponent, 135 — 3.2% — filled more than one seat and so carried more than one name; the other 4,105 offered a single name. Where the size of a race is discussed, only single-seat races are used, because a multi-seat total sums the votes of every winner and is not the number of people who voted.

Party labels

The party shown is the one the winner’s own state recorded on the ballot. “Nonpartisan” is a legal designation in states that strip party from judicial elections; seats with no label filed are counted separately and never assumed to belong to either party.

How the individual races were checked

Every race named in this article was confirmed against the state or county that published it, not against the research file alone. The Washington figures come from the Secretary of State’s certified return and match to the vote. West Almond was checked against Allegany County’s own results sheet, which records 130 votes cast and 103 for the winner against the 132 and 104 in the certified research file — a two-vote difference between the county’s election-night file and the certified return. Race totals were also validated against the real size of each legislative chamber rather than against the data itself.

What this cannot tell you

Official performance is outside the scope

Judicial ethics rules discourage campaigning, some incumbents are simply respected, and some places are small enough that one willing candidate is all there is. Nothing here measures whether any of these officials did the job well.

Write-ins can reduce the reported rate

Some states record scattered write-ins as ballot candidates, which can make an uncontested race appear contested. This affected 31 races, about half a percentage point, including 24 in Vermont. Correcting this issue would raise the reported 66.7% rate slightly.

Uneven state coverage

Coverage varies by state: Indiana's files name 1,945 distinct offices across the two cycles; Tennessee's name 5. This prevents a reliable comparison of state competitiveness and explains why the individual office totals cover 30 to 38 states rather than all 51 jurisdictions.

Two cycles, and no long trend

This series covers 2022 and 2024; it does not include 2020. Two cycles cannot establish a long-term trend. The analysis does not cover the 2026 ballot or filing deadlines.

Party differences vary by office

Republicans won 71.1% of their courthouse seats without an opponent, compared with 64.0% for Democrats. The largest office-level difference was among sheriffs: 71.5% versus 45.9%. Judges had similar rates, 64.6% Republican and 65.5% Democratic. More than a third of judicial seats had no party label.

Known holes in the source

Nine of the 6,358 courthouse races — all Indiana in 2022 — arrive with no vote total at all, and are excluded from anything about size. Nebraska files many offices without a district, which splits some contests across counties. Both are documented rather than repaired, and neither moves the headline: dropping every zero-vote race leaves the rate at 66.7%.

Classification is ours

Which office names count as a judge, a prosecutor or a sheriff is Civly’s rule, applied to the 2,557 distinct office titles that mention a court, a prosecutor or a sheriff. It is not a designation any state supplies. Reasonable alternatives move the top line by a few tenths of a point — treating county attorneys as prosecutors, for instance, raises the overall rate to 67.5% — and never change the ordering of the three offices.

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