Regardless of how the nation’s highest court decides Caperton v. Massey, the public already has passed judgment on the matter. A new national poll by Harris Interactive shows that Americans overwhelmingly doubt a judge’s impartiality if a party to a case has contributed heavily to the judge’s election, and the public strongly believes judges should step aside in such cases.

More than two-thirds of those polled said they would doubt a judge’s neutrality if one party had spent $50,000 to elect the judge. Those doubting the judge’s impartiality jumped to nearly three-quarters of respondents if one side spent $1 million to elect the judge.

Such questions are hardly an abstraction. In the West Virginia case, a coal executive spent $3 million to elect a new Supreme Court justice who then cast the deciding vote to overturn a $50 million jury award against the executive’s company. In a Wisconsin case dealing with whether Menasha Corporation should have to pay sales tax on computer software, state Supreme Court Justice Annette Ziegler opted not to recuse herself and ultimately cast the deciding vote and wrote the majority opinion overturning a lower court ruling that the company should pay the tax despite the fact that a party to the case – Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce – spent $2 million getting her elected.