When Mexicans arrive at voting booths next year to elect their judges for the first time, they face a unique and daunting task.

In the capital Mexico City, voters will have to choose judges for more than 150 positions, including on the Supreme Court, from a list of 1,000 candidates that most people have never heard of. For each of the 150 posts, space will be allotted for voters to write out individually the names of up to 10 preferred candidates.

Without makeshift solutions such as dividing up the judges into subdistricts, it could take 45 minutes just to fill in the ballot papers, one analyst estimated. Even with such fixes, voters will still have to choose from many dozens of unfamiliar names.

"It's impossible," said Jaime Olaiz-González, a constitutional theory professor at Mexico's Universidad Panamericana. "In no country, not even the most backward, have they proposed a system like this." The vote will be the culmination of a drive by the country's leftwing nationalist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to radically overhaul a branch of the state that has frequently angered him by blocking his plans.

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