Inquirer editorial: The misleading Pa. ballot question that shouldn't be asked

The underhanded lengths taken to extend the tenure of Pennsylvania judges nearing mandatory retirement are yet another example of why distrust in government looms large in American politics today.

The Republican-controlled legislature apparently feared that an April ballot question asking voters to increase the retirement age for judges from 70 to 75 would be defeated, threatening the tenure of the state Supreme Court's lone Republican, Chief Justice Thomas Saylor, who is 69.

Lawmakers asked Secretary of State Pedro Cortés to discount the referendum results, arguing that the question's wording was confusing and that it was too late to remove it from the ballot. Cortés complied, and Republicans wrote a starkly different and misleading question for the November ballot.

The reworded question asks only whether judges should be required to retire at 75, not mentioning that they are already required to retire at 70. The new wording might produce an outcome different from the invalidated vote in April, when a slight majority said "no" to raising the retirement age.

This blatant attempt to bamboozle voters prompted former Pennsylvania Chief Justices Ronald D. Castille and Stephen Zappala Sr. and Philadelphia lawyer Richard A. Sprague to sue in Commonwealth Court in an attempt to block the "deceitful" maneuver, as they put it. "The ballot question ... is misleadingly designed to garner 'yes' votes from voters who are actually in favor of restricting the terms of judges and justices," the suit says, "but are unaware that the proposed amendment will have the opposite effect."

It shouldn't take a lawsuit to get elected officials to remember their responsibility to the public. But if that's what it takes to get their attention, so be it.