Opponents of Improving the Missouri Plan Argue that Retention elections are an effective "check" by voters.

Judges are always retained.

Not one single appellate or Supreme Court Judge has lost retention in seventy years. A thirty-year study of ten states with some form of the “Missouri Plan” revealed that only 1.3% of judges in those states lost retention.

Opponents of reforming the selection process argue that the very small number of judges who have lost retention indicates that only good judges are being appointed. But this is not true.

For instance, in the 2006 retention election, a judge with the lowest rating ever (30%) was retained by a vote margin that was statistically insignificant to those judges who rated the highest.