Ballotmania: Inside the flurry of measures upending Massachusetts politics

SOMETIMES, A RAISED HAND is all it takes to kick off an 18-month campaign.

Framingham Democratic activists were celebrating their annual barbecue in July 2025 when 80-year-old Norma Shulman posed a simple question for the event’s special guest, Secretary of State Bill Galvin. What ever happened, she asked, to the proposal that would allow new voters to register on the same day they cast a ballot?

State law bars anyone from newly registering or changing the address at which they are registered within 10 days of an election. As a result, reform proponents argue, thousands of Bay Staters are disenfranchised each year when they head to the polls only to find out they are not registered or failed to update their address in time. Eliminating the blackout period has had major pockets of support on Beacon Hill for almost two decades — in fact, the Senate has approved some version of Election Day registration on three different occasions since 2008, but in each instance, the idea died because of resistance in the House.

Galvin, as Shulman recalls, made “a few little comments” about the repeatedly stalled effort and said he’d get back to her. Then, a couple of weeks later, her phone rang. It was the secretary, and he had a new idea.

“He said, ‘It’s just never going to get passed by the House. I’m doing something about it,’” Shulman recounted. Within days, the longest-serving secretary of state in Massachusetts history was standing in Shulman’s dining room, joined by some of her friends in Framingham, signing the paperwork to launch a campaign that would go directly to voters and ask them to write Election Day registration directly into state law.

Fast forward to today, and Shulman is chairing the main committee in support of the measure, circumventing a Legislature where the idea has long failed to earn the required support from all stakeholders. The question is one of nine on the ballot, tying the record for the most in a single year since Massachusetts wrote the option of direct democracy into its constitution 108 years ago.

It’s been more than three decades since voters last had this many significant decisions to make about state law. Across Massachusetts, while voters weigh reshaping how primary elections work and parse the particulars of the state tax cap formula, they find themselves asking another question: Why is all of this falling to us in the first place?

The surge in questions on the November ballot and the tens of millions of dollars being spent on them has revived debate about the process itself. Are initiative petitions a legitimate policymaking tool that citizens can wield when their elected officials are too resistant to public opinion? Or are they an outdated, poorly designed mechanism that can be exploited, especially in a post-Citizens United world, by those with a specific vision and money to burn?

Indeed, ballot questions have become the primary source of political kindling in a season when few races for elected office in Massachusetts are generating much heat of their own. Most of the people pushing the measures are not shy about bashing the Legislature, claiming they were forced into action because do-nothing politicians refuse to touch a widely popular idea. “It’s 1,000 percent the fault of the Legislature for not solving problems,” said Jim Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute, which is backing a question that would overhaul the state’s tax cap and rebate law.

Legislators have responded with defensiveness and disdain, worried that a surge in spending and a fragmented media environment opened the door for financed entities with little regard for nuance to coopt a democratic option. House Speaker Ron Mariano, who has spent more than a year grumbling about both the number and types of decisions now handed to voters, said in a statement for this story that the initiative petition process is “fundamentally broken,” taken advantage of by “special interest groups and overly-ambitious politicians who refuse to retreat from maximalist positions.”

Disagreement over ballot questions is fragmenting state government itself, too. Galvin, no stranger to tussling with lawmakers, is directly at odds with Democratic colleagues in the Legislature over the issue. So, too, is Auditor Diana DiZoglio, who led a successful campaign in 2024 for a ballot question empowering her to probe the House and Senate and is now following that up with a new measure that would subject the Legislature and governor’s office to the public records law. Concerned by the constitutional implications, Democrats in the Legislature have indicated they might substitute their preferred version of a records transparency bill for the one voters embrace, risking a worsening political fracas at a time when Beacon Hill’s transparency is already under fire.

Joshua Dyck, a political science professor at UMass Lowell who co-authored a 2019 book about direct democracy, called the trend a “spiral of distrust” between disgruntled constituents and irritated lawmakers.

“When people use the initiative [process] more, they’re signaling that they don’t trust the government,” he said. “Then, when voters show up and they see nine measures on the ballot — or 15 or 20 in other [states] — it also confirms to them that government isn’t doing their job because now they have to go and read this long voter guide and figure out how to vote on all these issues. They walk out of the voting booth no matter how they vote going, ‘Man, the Legislature’s not doing their job.’”

Stuck in the middle are voters, who will either need to make uninformed decisions with potentially permanent consequences, or form substantive opinions in the next week on nine proposals ranging from the fate of a 115-page gun control law to minimum lot size requirements for home construction.

In the birthplace of the American Revolution, is there such thing as too much democracy?

The right for concerned voters to bring a policy change directly to their peers has been guaranteed since 1918, when Massachusetts joined a trend of progressive-minded democratic reforms that swept through the country in the wake of Gilded Age corruption and stagnation.

It was a vastly different time — Massachusetts was still a year away from ratifying the Nineteenth Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote — and yet the arguments made in favor of enshrining a right to direct democracy appear familiar today. Ironically, it was a former House speaker, Joseph Walker, who led the charge after previous state leaders failed to win enough support for the change. At a months-long constitutional convention on the topic, Walker thundered that Beacon Hill was beholden to “sinister influence” from “lobbyists who appear yearly.” His campaign was eventually successful, and a new way of lawmaking business was born.

The nine statewide questions on the ballot this year tie the record for most in a single year, matching 1994, 1976, and 1972. It looked like we would smash that and set a historic high of 12, but judicial intervention wiped three questions from contention, whittling down the field.

A citizen-originated ballot question these days hinges on a single early decision: instead of advocating for the House and Senate to take up the idea and perhaps change it along the way, proponents conclude they would rather spend several million dollars running a 15-month campaign, collecting tens of thousands of signatures, and convincing enough voters to squeak out a majority win at the polls.

Campaign leaders pull that lever for a host of reasons. Sometimes, the measure contains a proposal the Legislature has refused to advance despite little opposition; sometimes, it’s something so controversial the Legislature will never touch it; sometimes, a proponent files a question with the implicit goal of gaining leverage to pressure lawmakers on Beacon Hill, but winds up seeing it all the way through to Election Day anyway.

Lew Finfer, a veteran organizer who has been involved in almost every fight over the past four decades to improve life for working-class residents, recalled meeting with then-Senate President Therese Murray in the early 2010s, when labor groups were pushing for a minimum-wage increase and lawmakers seemed skeptical. At first, Finfer recalled, Murray told organizers, “I’ll do the best I can” — which he translates as, “I’ll decide, I have the cards.” Once union leaders said they were prepared to put the question on the ballot, the conversation changed.

“We told her that, and she said, ‘Oh, that would be different. Oh, people would have to take a stand on this,’” the usually soft-spoken Finfer recalled with a rising voice, punctuating every syllable as he pantomimed Murray. “It was like you’d never seen her so animated.”

Much to the chagrin of Beacon Hill, ballot measures are a chainsaw method of policymaking instead of the more traditional chisel. It’s largely a structural feature: once a question clears eligibility and signature requirements, lawmakers can only approve it as written, take no action and allow it to proceed to voters, or broker a compromise in which the Legislature approves a bill tackling the same topic and proponents agree to drop their campaign. “That results in questions going to the voters that are overly simplistic, create more problems, in my view, than they solve, and give an artificial sense that this is a good way to make law,” said Rep. Alice Peisch, who co-chaired committee hearings on every initiative petition in the past two cycles.

While the most common response from legislative leaders over the years has been disdain, there have always been those who hewed more closely to former speaker Walker’s view, respecting ballot initiatives as a valuable offering that can complement the traditional lawmaking path. That’s the case for John McDonough and Stan Rosenberg, the two men most responsible for a landmark 1994 campaign finance and ethics law that took aim at many of the political ills animating ballot questions in the first place.

In 1993, The Boston Globe put Beacon Hill’s top Democrats in the hot seat with a Spotlight series documenting, as the first story put it, “an insiders club that takes care of its own interests first and deals with public policy later.” For the second story, splashed across the front page were photos depicting then-House Speaker Charles Flaherty lounging on a Puerto Rican beach where, instead of attending a legislative conference in San Juan, he and a group of lawmakers indulged in a private four-day party on the other end of the island, funded by their campaign accounts and scores of lobbyists who were in attendance to bend ears.

Incensed by the controversy, the good-government group Common Cause Massachusetts launched a ballot question that sought to crack down on lobbyist donations to politicians, significantly lower the cap on maximum campaign contributions a person can make toward a candidate, and require donors to disclose their job and employer. McDonough and Rosenberg, who together led the Election Laws Committee at the time, had extensive conversations with the question’s backers and ultimately produced a compromise bill that overhauled the state’s campaign finance law. Common Cause was satisfied enough to drop its ballot question charge.

“The campaign election reform of ‘94 never would have happened were it not for the initiative petition process,” McDonough said.

He has long thought Massachusetts is better off with initiative petitions available, even if the system has flaws. “I was an outlier,” McDonough, who served in the House from 1985 to 1997 and penned a seminal feature about ballot questions for CommonWealth in 2002, said. “Most of my colleagues despised it and wished that it wasn’t there or that they could get rid of it.” (McDonough, now a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, also co-hosts CommonWealth Beacon’s Health or Consequences podcast.)

“Importantly,” he added, “I haven’t been to another state where legislators in those states don’t feel exactly the same way. There’s nothing atypical about Massachusetts lawmakers’ annoyance with the process.”

His counterpart in those 1994 negotiations, Rosenberg, feels somewhat differently about ballot questions today than he did earlier in his career. Rosenberg rose all the way to Senate president before departing in 2017 amid a sexual harassment scandal involving his husband. During his tenure, he often positioned himself as a good-government reformist who was committed to small-d democracy, including both its representative and direct variations. In recent years, however, Rosenberg has become convinced that “money is too powerful a force” behind ballot measures.

“If there’s a 30-page piece of legislation that’s been put on the ballot, most people are not going to study that, not going to have enough information to know whether there are elements of it that are going to be unworkable, unmanageable, unfair, or downright unprincipled,” Rosenberg said. “I do not object to direct democracy as an element in our system. I believe that that system is no longer working as it should.”

Comparatively, it’s easier to place a proposed law before voters in Massachusetts than anywhere else in the country, at least in terms of gathering signatures to qualify. Only California, Colorado, and Louisiana will have more questions on their ballots this Election Day.

But why there are so many all at once — what it is about the state of our politics that led so many organizers to say, “Forget the Legislature, I’ll do it myself” — elides an easy answer. The most common theory, one floated by most people leading initiative campaigns, is that the Legislature has become particularly inefficient, and ballot questions are necessary to get movement on popular ideas.

Dissatisfaction with Beacon Hill, especially its pace of work, is clearly growing. Lawmakers have not sent the governor an on-time annual state budget in 15 years. In 2022 and 2024, the House and Senate kept their final formal sessions of the term going overnight and well past sunrise the following morning; somewhat abashed by the upheaval, the Legislature this time around granted itself permission to tie up any loose ends beyond the traditional July 31 date. Little has happened since then, and now more than a dozen major decisions will need to take place in the lame-duck weeks after the election.

“The volume of questions is a reflection of the degree of frustration,” said Danielle Allen, a Harvard University professor and longtime democratic reform activist leading the campaign to institute all-party primaries through the ballot box. “I think it’s a symptom, and I think people need to recognize it as a symptom.”

It’s a diagnosis shared by Galvin, himself a former state representative who has now served as secretary of state longer than any current counterpart in the country. “The people who are interested in these issues, whatever side they’re on and whatever issue it is, oftentimes have been attempting to get legislative action for years. They’ve spent money, significant amounts of money, on lobbyists to do that, not to mention grassroots efforts, and it’s all come to naught,” Galvin told CommonWealth Beacon. “As a result, they’ve concluded it might be cheaper to spend big money on an actual ballot campaign. History suggests that’s effective.”

We asked: Does the surge in ballot questions reflect the system working as intended, or is it a sign that something is broken?

Danielle Allen, longtime democracy reform activist and backer of Question 3: “The volume of questions is a reflection of the degree of frustration. I think it’s a symptom, and I think people need to recognize it as a symptom.”

Auditor Diana DiZoglio: “It’s both. I think it’s the system working as intended — the ballot question process is a constitutional right of the people to protect against government tyranny and to hold their elected officials to account — and it’s also a sign that the Legislature has not been as effective as it could be.”

Senator Cindy Friedman: “I think something is broken and needs to be fixed, and I think it has to do with the influence of money and how, to a certain extent, we’ve lost a sense of common good. This may be good for you. Is it good for others? I see a trend, and that trend is money. It’s everywhere.”

Secretary of State Bill Galvin: “It’s both … The law is doing what it was intended to do: provide an alternative to those who want to advocate for an issue … None of that makes it less of a crude mechanism to effectuate policy changes.”

Rep. Alice Peisch: “I don’t think it’s either/or. The fact that there is legislation in conference at the moment that would establish a commission to look at the process — that is an indication that we think there may be some aspects of the process that could be improved.”

Stan Rosenberg, former Senate president: “I do not object to direct democracy as an element in our system. I believe that system is no longer working as was intended when it was established in the early 1900s because money is too powerful a force now in these ballot campaigns.”

Jim Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute and a backer of Question 5: “The system’s working as it’s supposed to. I know it’s uncomfortable for people who are used to calling the shots from within one building. They don’t like to be questioned, or they don’t like to have extra variables thrown into their day. But honestly, every single person who lives in Massachusetts, they’re living a life that is variable. They’re trying to make ends meet. They’re trying to do stuff that gets their kids to move ahead. And what the Legislature’s doing right now, it ain’t working.”

Photo details and credits: Danielle Allen (Leise Jones Photography); Diana DiZoglio, Sec. Galvin, Sen. Friedman, and Rep. Peisch (Chris Lisinski/CommonWealth Beacon); Stan Rosenberg (MassINC); Jim Stergios (Rappaport Center/CC BY 2.0)

Many proposals have indeed existed in the legislative arena for years, but it’s not a universal truth. Two questions (Election Day registration and public defender unionization rights) came to be because sponsors grew tired of watching the proposals die in the Legislature. Two others (public records and all-party primaries) target electoral reforms or a degree of transparency to which the Legislature is unlikely to agree. One (tax cap reform) is more or less aimed at kickstarting a broader debate about state spending and the business climate, another (recreational marijuana ban) seems to originate with a national, secretly funded effort to undo drug legalization in states, and yet another (a gun law repeal) is led by citizens exercising their constitutional right for a voter referendum on a new law they dislike.

Evan Horowitz, executive director of the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University who has studied each of the measures, thinks it’s a mistake to graft a single storyline onto the entire ballot. For evidence, he points to the measure that would earmark a share of sales tax revenue from sporting goods purchases and use it for conservation efforts.

“There was a bill there. The Legislature didn’t act on it. It’s now a ballot initiative. But it’s totally reasonable to me the Legislature didn’t act on it because they didn’t think it was a good idea,” Horowitz said. “That’s quite different than if they didn’t act on it because they were lazy or not responsive.”

Lawmakers have argued the explosion reflects the growing, corrosive role of money in politics, with well-funded groups easily able to bankroll the work of gathering signatures and campaigning. “It’s definitely a question of money because getting 11 ballot questions at least certified to a certain extent with that many signatures that you have to get — that’s huge,” said Sen. Cindy Friedman, who joined Peisch to co-chair hearings on the ballot measures.

The proposals have indisputably gotten much more expensive. In 1994, the nine questions on the ballot generated a combined $11.8 million in spending over the course of the entire campaign. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $25.5 million in 2025 dollars, a number that today seems quaint. Almost exactly that much money had already changed hands for the current crop of nine questions by October 15, two and a half weeks before the election. In five separate instances since 2016, a single question generated more than $35 million in spending, adjusted for inflation.

Massachusetts was almost certain to see its spending records vaporized two years ago. For years, ride-for-hire giants Uber and Lyft defined their sprawling networks of drivers as independent contractors, not employees. After then-Attorney General Maura Healey sued, claiming that classification violated state labor law, the companies and their allies launched a campaign for a ballot question that would have codified their drivers as independent contractors, essentially asking voters to rewrite the law they were alleged to be violating.

The companies put roughly $34 million into the campaign before dropping their effort in June 2024, after Uber and Lyft agreed to a settlement with Attorney General Andrea Campbell that forced them to increase driver wages but allowed them to retain independent contractor status. Had they kept going all the way to the ballot, the dollar figure would have grown much larger, especially because spending on campaigns tends to be heavily backloaded closer to Election Day. In California, gig economy giants spent more than $200 million on a similar measure voters approved in 2020.

Here in the Bay State, something shifted around 2014, and the trend has not yet reversed. Campaigns are spending way more to get proposed laws and constitutional amendments onto the ballot and to sway voters. In the three decades from 1992 to 2012, the inflation-adjusted average spend per question never exceeded $10 million. In every cycle since then, the same figure has soared into double digits, reaching as high as nearly $38 million in 2020, when a “right-to-repair” measure dealing with motor vehicle telematic data smashed individual question records.

It’s hard to say exactly why ballot measures have gotten so much more expensive, and most likely, there isn’t a singular reason. Campaigns are more professionalized, which costs more. Many operations pay professional firms to collect the voter signatures needed to qualify a question; while paid signature-gatherers are far from new, it’s possible the growing demand has allowed them to charge more.

Dyck, the UMass Lowell professor, believes the funding explosion reflects a broader trend. “Increasing spending is a signal of increasing conflict, which means initiatives are being contested over ‘hot’ or ‘highly contested’ issues,” he said. “That’s going to generate a lot of interest, a lot of advertisement, and bring a lot of pro and con money to the table.”

Friedman thinks the amount of money now sloshing around is an obvious problem that “warps the notions of democracy.” When her predecessors embraced direct democracy as a lawmaking tool 108 years ago, she argued, a massive, corporate-backed spending blitz was not what they had in mind.

“The intent wasn’t to allow outside groups or people who had a lot of money but were disappointed by how things work to have an oversized influence on those policies,” she said. “I just don’t believe that that is what the intent was.”

Lawmakers are certainly aware of the narrative that the record-tying field is itself a referendum on the Legislature, a collective raised fist demanding more from government. Peisch, a top deputy to Speaker Mariano, thinks that idea is partly fueled by broader changes to the political climate, especially the fragmentation of debate ushered in by social media and the shrinkage of a once-robust State House press corps.

“That has had an enormous detrimental impact on how the public views the Legislature,” Peisch said. “That’s related to these questions because some of them — not all, but some of them — are driven by this mistaken impression that we’re completely unresponsive. In my view, it’s not that we’re unresponsive. It’s that particular individuals and organizations don’t like the response.”

At times, legislative irritation metastasizes into action to significantly alter or even nullify what voters order. In 2000, Massachusetts voters approved a ballot question to cut the income tax rate by almost a full percentage point over a three-year span. Two years into the transition, lawmakers voted to freeze the rate at the partially reduced level and condition the remaining step down on a series of economic triggers; that did not happen until 2019, nearly two decades after the question passed. In 1998, voters approved a “clean elections” ballot question providing for public financing of elections; five years later, lawmakers tucked language into the state budget scrapping the measure altogether.

Those maneuvers might be politically unpalatable, but they are not illegal — and lawmakers, many of whom run for re-election unopposed, rarely pay a price for them. A measure approved at the ballot box becomes state law on equal footing with anything that moves through both chambers and earns the governor’s signature. Legislators are empowered to adjust anything in state law as they see fit.

This time around, top Massachusetts Democrats might pull the trigger more quickly. A pair of bills, one subjecting the Legislature to a public records framework less extensive than the ballot question and another adding a new, stricter eligibility trigger for tax rebates, are tied up in House-Senate negotiations. If lawmakers choose to do so, they can surface either or both measures right before or right after the election, nullifying or dramatically changing what voters decide on Questions 1 and 5.

Unsurprisingly, the chance of a ballot question rewrite or two has not gone over well in many corners. DiZoglio, the leader of the public records campaign who is years into a related fight over the not-yet-implemented audit law, has vowed to pursue legal action if Beacon Hill neuters Question 1. “They are trying to usurp our constitutional right as the voters of this Commonwealth in real time,” she told CommonWealth Beacon.

Even former lawmakers gave the pending maneuver a less-than-favorable review. “Boy, that’s creative,” said Rosenberg, who spent two years as Senate president. “Either you cut a deal, or you fight it out on the ballot and then see what happens and then make your next moves,” added McDonough. “I think undermining it in that way is not an appropriate response. There are better ways to do this.”

Current legislators defended the potential rapid changes, arguing that they have both the right and responsibility to amend laws approved at the ballot when they have overriding concerns about the substance.

“While I agree that we should update the public records law, there are things in that ballot [question] that I would argue make it almost impossible for me to do my job,” said Friedman, a top Senate deputy. “If I want to fix that, I have to then take that ballot initiative once it passes, if it passes, I then have to change it. And then what happens is all those people start screaming, ‘You’re not following the will of the people.’ So I’m stuck in a very difficult situation because it’s my job to make law. That’s what you elected me to do.”

Legislatures in other states have been even more aggressive in their battles against direct democracy. GOP lawmakers in Missouri unsuccessfully sought to require any citizen-led initiative to win a majority of votes in each of the state’s congressional districts, not just statewide. In both Utah and South Dakota, where voters previously embraced Medicaid expansion over the opposition of lawmakers, Republicans placed questions on this year’s ballot requiring at least 60 percent voter support for many future questions to pass.

While they disagree on the diagnosis, both Beacon Hill and many of the campaign leaders seeking to circumvent it find common ground on one point: having nine questions that touch on so many topics, some of which are intricate and dense, asks a lot of voters.

“Why are you making us vote on these things? They’re too complicated,” Peisch recalls one constituent telling her. Shulman, the longtime organizer now working on the Election Day registration question, was out knocking on doors recently, and she heard from more than one voter who was struggling to make sense of the 88-page ballot question summary booklet mailed out by Galvin’s office. “They’re kind of tearing their hair out,” she said.

For Rosenberg, the former Senate president, the attempt to reshape a tax cap and rebate law is particularly daunting. To understand that measure, one first needs to comprehend the 1986 voter law known as Chapter 62F that set a limit on state tax collections in a given year and the specific way that threshold is calculated, then decide whether it’s better to keep the cap tied to the prior year’s limit or instead change its basis to the prior year’s total revenue.

“It’s a challenge for tax attorneys to try to explain that, never mind a volunteer, or never mind a voter sitting in their living room reading the secretary of state’s guide,” Rosenberg said. “Which is why a lot of people don’t vote on the ballot questions, and that’s a calculation that people who put questions on the ballot make.”

So if a cocktail of sclerotic governance, interest groups with money to burn, and easy ballot access got us to this point, is a cascade of questions the new normal? Is Massachusetts on its way to becoming more like California, with 10 or more new laws decided every election?

Perhaps not. There’s a very real chance this cycle brings about material changes to the process itself.

Lawmakers are on the verge of codifying new campaign finance rules for ballot questions that would close an eight-month blackout period in which organizers do not need to disclose anything about their funders. If the House gets its way, Beacon Hill will also convene a new commission tasked with conducting a top-to-bottom review of the entire initiative petition process.

Some changes are possible through state law, which the Legislature and governor can achieve on their own. A more extensive overhaul would require an amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution, a dramatic step that, somewhat ironically, would culminate with a ballot question in which voters get the final say.

Absent any real reconciliation, ballot questions will remain a political Rorschach test, a trend at which anyone can look and spot evidence for their preexisting arguments about the efficiency of the Democratic supermajority or the pernicious power of money in politics.

Many ballot question campaigns start because someone is irked about inaction or an undesirable outcome on a specific policy; when legislators respond by decrying campaigners, they can appear insulated and paternalistic, unwilling to engage with voter demands. That opens the door for a subsequent wave of initiative petitions pitched as tackling the issues lawmakers are unwilling to face. Over time, the dynamic can become an ouroboros of frustration begetting more frustration.

Mariano declared earlier this year that the ballot question process is “fraught with peril.” To Allen, that line translates instead as, “You want to be heard, and I don’t want to listen.”

“In an ideal world, you would always be able to do transformative change through the Legislature,” said Allen, who briefly ran for governor in 2022. “But the ballot initiative process is an important safety valve on the fact that, at the end of the day, insiders and gatekeepers will reach a point of entrenchment where they will protect the system as it is, even when people are manifestly frustrated with it.”

In the meantime, voters will continue to have homework. A whole lot of homework.

Courtesy of Commonwealth Beacon