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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.

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.

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, 97.6% of everything cast, and 61,866 write-ins. 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 the 2024 contest for town justice in West Almond, in Allegany County, New York, which drew 130 votes. The justice took 103 of them. The other 27 were write-ins, and the county’s results sheet lists each name. One write-in was for 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.

Candidate recruitment efforts

Contest Every Race, founded in 2018 inside the organizing group Movement Labs, recruits candidates for uncontested elections. It reports 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. It was the first full slate either party has managed in modern Texas history, and nine in ten of the recruits had never 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.

24,426 elections across all offices in those two cycles had no opponent. Each record lists the office, the district, the county and the winner’s name. 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 standardizing these returns is written up in Scientific Data, and the datasets are archived at the Harvard Dataverse. The data was pulled and recomputed on August 13, 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. Contest Every Race and BallotReady publish partial counts of uncontested elections. Neither breaks out prosecutors, judges, and sheriffs.

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. A title that could belong to either office is counted as a prosecutor, so Georgia’s State Court Solicitor is a prosecutor. 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 toward turnout but are not treated as an opponent. Several states record every person written in, so an unopposed sheriff could 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 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 are not assigned 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. The Washington figures match the Secretary of State’s certified return to the vote. Allegany County’s results sheet for West Almond records 130 votes cast and 103 for the winner. The certified research file has 132 and 104, a two-vote difference between the county’s election-night file and the certified return. Race totals were also checked against the number of seats in each legislative chamber.

What this cannot tell you

Official performance is outside the scope

Judicial ethics rules discourage campaigning, some incumbents are respected, and some places have only one willing candidate. The count does not measure 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

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

Two cycles only

This series covers 2022 and 2024 and 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

9 of the 6,358 courthouse races, all in Indiana in 2022, have no vote total and are excluded from the size figures. Nebraska files many offices without a district, which splits some contests across counties. Neither issue was corrected in the data. Dropping every zero-vote race leaves the rate at 66.7%.

Classification is ours

Civly classified the 2,557 distinct office titles that mention a court, a prosecutor or a sheriff. No state supplies this classification. Other reasonable rules change the overall rate by a few tenths of a point and leave the order of the three offices unchanged. Treating county attorneys as prosecutors, for example, raises the overall rate to 67.5%.

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