The order in which candidate responses are presented can change an LLM judge's verdict.
Detecting such a position flip ordinarily requires judging each pair in both orders, which doubles the number of judgments.
We investigate whether residual stream activations recorded immediately before the initial verdict can predict a flip.
We use nested grouped cross-validation to evaluate regularized linear probes on 534 JudgeBench pairs for three Qwen3 judges and Llama-3.1-8B.
The linear probes achieve AUROCs of .621-.850 and outperform a combined baseline that uses verbalized confidence, verdict-label logits, response lengths, and the judge's initial choice by .062-.113 AUROC.
Linear probes trained on JudgeBench and then frozen achieve AUROCs of .685-.853 on 1,802 MT-Bench comparisons without MT-Bench fitting or recalibration.
These results show that pre-verdict activations support prediction of susceptibility to candidate order and outperform the non-activation predictors evaluated here.