The perverse consequences of judicial elections mount.

The Supreme Court has ruled that “[e]lected judges must disqualify themselves from cases involving people who spent exceptionally large sums to put them on the bench.”

That may not sound so bad, but the decision appears to create an ill-defined standard of “disproportionate influence” that could actually encourage further meddling in judicial elections:

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a decision that split along familiar ideological lines, said the Constitution required disqualification when an interested party’s spending had a “disproportionate influence” in a case that was “pending or imminent.”

Monday’s decision concerned an extreme case, and it announced a vague and general standard that will be refined and applied in the lower courts. The justices in the majority said they did not intend “unnecessary interference with judicial elections.”

But the four dissenting justices predicted that the decision would generate a flood of groundless recusal motions and undermine confidence in the judiciary.

As I wrote back in February, such a standard could have a host of unintended consequences:

[A] ruling that judges have to recuse themselves in such cases could have the perverse effect of drawing more money into the system. Attorneys, companies, and individuals might choose to make large contributions as an insurance policy so that they would have a basis to demand recusals by ideologically hostile judges in future court cases.

Imagine that you are a business or individual want to influence a state supreme court and you have large amounts of money at your disposal. This ruling may prevent you from directly obtaining favorable rulings from justices you help elect in cases to which you are a party. But you can still help put someone on the court who is ideologically sympathetic to your beliefs. And if your preferred candidate loses, you can challenge the winning justice as biased against you and try to get them removed from any case to which you are a party. It’s a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose situation.

(Unfortunately, there’s no good solution to these problems other than eliminating judicial elections, which is generally impossible as a political matter.)