Somewhere Iowa went off the track and regressed to the Federalist idea that only one person should have the franchise when it comes to selecting judges ~ to wit, the President.
That notion, of course, went right down the tube when Thomas Jefferson simply FIRED a bunch of federal judges of whom he did not approve when he took office ~ thereby neatly getting around the "remuneration shall not be diminished" standard AND the fact federal judges seemed to have unlimited appointments.
Later on during the period of initial organization and settlement of the Old Northwest ALL the judges in the new state governments were set up as elected jobs with limited terms.
The same was true in the Louisiana Territory (of which Iowa was once a part).
Jefferson, the President who fired judges, preferred that they also be elected by the people.
The modern standard adopted in too many states is that ONLY QUALIFIED people should be selected to be judges, and the franchise should be restricted to the Governor.
Obviously this is not a Jeffersonian idea, and it does run counter to not only early United States history, but to recent United States history.
Restriction of the franchise to lawyers is as ridiculous as restricting it to property owners of $5 billion net worth would be. If anything, our most recent experience with lawyers suggests that they should be TOTALLY DISENFRANCHISED. If they are to be officers of the court, they should be restricted to that job, and not allowed to be members of legislatures, nor commissions, nor any other office of profit or trust. Even if elected as a judge (yes, I'd let them run for judgeships) they should be forced to resign from the bar and foreswear any future membership in the bar. They can be a judge or a lawyer but not both!
The franchise for electing judges should be stripped from the governors and commissions and returned to the people as a whole.
Non-lawyers as judges used to be possible in Georgia back when we had the J.P. (Justice of the Peace) system. They were all elected from the old militia districts which still exist but aren't used any more. In fact, I tried a case in front of a non-lawyer judge, Sarge Mashburn who was a J.P. out in Gwinnett County. Very nice man and he had been on the bench for quite awhile so he knew the ropes, and it was a pretty straightforward case. It worked out o.k. My dad also told me about a superior court judge who used to be a barber before he was a judge -- but I think he went to law school in between.
But it was a very limited system, and there were severe problems when a non-lawyer J.P. got hold of a complicated case. A lot of time and money was spent trying to clean up the mistakes they made - and it wasn't always possible. The J.P.s were eventually abolished, and that was a good thing on balance.
If some lawyers (and more importantly, the clients) had a complicated contract case in front of a journeyman judge with no legal training when he's just come on the bench, it would be an unmitigated disaster. Judging may not be rocket science, but it's become quite technical and complicated, and there's usually a substantial amount of money at stake. Not to mention people's freedom.
And the Georgia General Assembly has been experimenting a bit with non-lawyers writing laws (the number of lawyers in the GA has dropped precipitously, nobody's sure why). It doesn't work worth a darn. There are incredibly bad unintended consequences, a lot of confusion, and substantial financial costs for the poor schmoos who get caught in the toils of the law.
A hybrid system like the Georgia one works pretty well, the voters can throw a bad judge out on his ear if somebody's mad enough to run against him. But asking non-lawyers to be judges is like giving a guy off the street a box of tools and telling him to replace the fuel injector on your Maserati. It won't end well.