Review note: Garcia for Judge 2026 and Michelle Paradise for Judge may have more bias because they are advocacy voter guides compared to other formal government and nonprofit journalism sources.
- voteinfo.net (opens in a new tab)Riverside County elections office — certified June 2, 2026 primary results
- ballotpedia.org (opens in a new tab)Ballotpedia — June 2026 California primary
- pressenterprise.com (opens in a new tab)Press-Enterprise — 3 candidates seek open seat on Riverside County Superior Court bench (career histories, direct quotes on motivation and judicial philosophy)
- pressenterprise.com (opens in a new tab)Press-Enterprise — Michelle Paradise, Riverside Judge Office No. 10 candidate, 2026 primary election questionnaire
- pressenterprise.com (opens in a new tab)Press-Enterprise — Andrea Garcia, Riverside Judge Office No. 10 candidate, 2026 primary election questionnaire
- paradiseforjudge.com (opens in a new tab)Michelle Paradise for Judge — ballot statement page (biography and career claims in her own words)
- garciaforjudge2026.com (opens in a new tab)Garcia for Judge 2026 — campaign homepage (biography and career claims in her own words)
Last updated September 24, 2026.
County
Judge of the Superior Court, Office No. 10
A countywide seat on the Riverside County Superior Court, the state trial court (6-year term).
Michelle Paradise led the June 2 primary with 44.0%. Andrea Garcia took 38.8%. Neither reached a majority, so the two meet again on November 3. This is a nonpartisan countywide seat.
A Superior Court judge serves a six-year term on California's trial court — the court where criminal cases, family law, probate, small claims and most civil disputes are actually decided. One judge's rulings affect thousands of people a year, and judicial elections draw far less attention than the stakes warrant. Judges may be reappointed or re-elected for decades, so a six-year term is often the start of a much longer tenure.
We could not find substantive coverage of either candidate, and no bar association evaluation for this race appears in the sources we track. That is worth knowing plainly: this is a six-year judicial appointment and the published record available to us describes only the primary result. Judicial ethics also limit what candidates may say about how they would rule, so some of this silence is structural rather than a choice either made.
Michelle Paradise
Michelle Paradise has spent her whole career in the Riverside County justice system. She started as a 911 dispatcher for the police and fire departments while she was in college and law school. After passing the bar in 1997 she spent more than 25 years as a prosecutor, handling child abuse, sex crimes and complex homicide cases, and she says she tried more than 100 cases before a jury. She now oversees the county's public safety departments, including the sheriff, the district attorney, the public defender and probation.
She says running for judge felt like the next step after decades in public service. She says her judicial philosophy is to follow the law, not politics, and to apply it fairly and with integrity. In her current job, she says she helped set up virtual meetings between people in jail and their defense lawyers so cases move faster.
She promises to set aside her own views on the bench and apply the law evenly to everyone. She also says judges should not try to make policy, since that job belongs to elected lawmakers.
Andrea Garcia
Andrea Garcia is a deputy public defender in San Bernardino County and a certified specialist in immigration law. She earned her law degree in 2005 and was admitted to the California bar in 2007. After law school she volunteered with a human rights group in Oaxaca, Mexico, then spent more than a decade as a private immigration attorney. She later built the first immigration unit inside the Riverside County Public Defender's Office.
She says she wants to be a judge because the role is neutral, deciding cases by looking at the law rather than taking a side. She says she helped build a program that reviews old criminal convictions for their immigration consequences, so people are not deported over cases that could be fixed. No lawsuit or other public dispute involving her work turned up in available coverage.
She promises to apply the law without bias, regardless of her own beliefs. Her campaign says she has already helped write state legislation on fair sentencing and access to courts.
Your pick
A nonpartisan office: candidates do not run as Democrats or Republicans, and no party appears on the ballot.