FACING QUESTIONS about the millions of dollars investment executives have put toward a ballot question that would overhaul primary elections, the petition’s chief proponent, Danielle Allen, insisted the campaign is “Massachusetts-grown, Massachusetts-supported.” That is more or less true.

Allen’s opponent at a CommonWealth Beacon debate, Jordan Berg Powers, asserted the controversial effort is buoyed by money from “the same people” who funded similar campaigns in Colorado and Arizona. That is also more or less true.

While most of the wealthy donors backing the proposal call Massachusetts home, the measure on next week’s ballot is not their first foray into funding a campaign to reshape state elections systems. More than a dozen individuals financially supporting Question 3 together previously contributed millions of dollars, directly or indirectly, toward similar campaigns in other states, a CommonWealth Beacon analysis of campaign finance records found.

The ballot question seeks to eliminate separate Democratic and Republican primary elections in Massachusetts and replace them with a single, “all-party” primary in which all candidates from every party appear on a single ballot and the top two finishers advance.

To be clear, there is nothing illicit about donors backing similar ballot measures in multiple jurisdictions. And for the donors based in Massachusetts, the launch of the all-party primary campaign here provided a chance to support something at home that they had already backed elsewhere.

But the financial records paint a more nuanced picture of where the money comes from, and they color Massachusetts as the next front in a national debate over systemic reforms aiming to fix persistent electoral problems.

Joshua Dyck, a political science professor at UMass Lowell, said there has been a trend over the past decade of high-dollar donors from the business world “trying to keep our politics from going too far to the right and too far to the left” through electoral changes like top-two primary elections and ranked-choice voting.

“What you’re seeing is a push out of these very, very wealthy places — wealthy donors, private equity — to try to moderate the politics, and they’re trying to moderate it by changing the underlying institutions,” Dyck said. “There’s an attempt to change the way that we elect people because [partisan] primaries have started to elect people further to the left and further to the right, and have increasingly become ideologically extreme litmus tests within both parties.”

Thirty-nine different people or entities have contributed at least $50,000 to the campaign since last year. Many of them work at high-profile investment firms or private equity giants, like the Mitt Romney-cofounded Bain Capital.

That list includes Randy Peeler, Ross Jones, and Robert Small of Berkshire Partners and John Carroll of Summit Partners, each of whom also donated at least $125,000 to the campaign that unsuccessfully backed a similar ballot question in Colorado two years ago. Peeler steered another $125,000 to organizers of another 2024 ballot question in Arizona that sought to implement an all-party primary system. (Peeler is a founding donor to CommonWealth Beacon.)

More than a dozen people who have contributed at least $50,000 to the Massachusetts campaign — including Andrew Balson of Cove Hill Partners and former state revenue commissioner Mark Nunnelly — have also cut sizable checks since 2020 toward a group called Unite America, which in turn put millions of dollars into supporting all-party primaries in multiple states.

CommonWealth Beacon attempted to contact all 18 donors to Question 3 who also put money into similar measures in other states two years ago or toward Unite America, typically by sending inquiries to their employers or to organizations on whose boards they sit. Most did not respond. None agreed to be interviewed on the record.

Founded in 2014 as the Centrist Project, Unite America today works to support state-level elections and democratic reforms. Its political action committee and a related arm, the Unite America Reform Fund, have spent significant money supporting efforts such as an independent redistricting commission in Virginia.

The organization’s self-described “top objective,” though, is one now familiar to Massachusetts voters: replacing separate partisan primaries with races in which all candidates appear on a single primary ballot.

In 2024, Unite America’s PAC spent more than $5.8 million in support of a primary election overhaul ballot measure in Arizona, $2.2 million on the Colorado proposal, another $2.1 million on a similar effort in Montana, and close to $2 million backing a version of the idea in South Dakota. Voters in all four states rejected the questions.

Two years earlier, Unite America directed almost $8 million toward a campaign seeking to move Nevada toward a top-five, nonpartisan primary system with ranked-choice voting. Voters there approved a question in 2022, but the proposal faltered when it failed to secure the required second statewide vote in 2024.

So far, Unite America does not appear to have gotten involved in the Massachusetts campaign. A spokesperson for the group did not respond to multiple inquiries from CommonWealth Beacon.

Peeler is the biggest figure involved on both fronts. He’s poured $1.05 million into the Question 3 campaign so far — more than any other single person has contributed to a ballot question this cycle — and has donated more than $4.3 million toward Unite America since 2020.

Some of the donors have been involved in other democratic reform and civic engagement projects, too, such as the unsuccessful 2020 ballot question campaign to bring ranked-choice voting to Massachusetts. Peeler is one of the largest donors to American Promise, a group pushing for a US constitutional amendment to more forcefully limit the role of money in politics, giving the group more than half a million dollars each of the past two years. Brian Conway, a senior advisor at TA Associates who has donated $300,000to support Question 3, also gave between $25,000 and $99,999 to American Promise last year.

Andrew Sinclair, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College who specializes in American political reforms, said it’s unsurprising that supporters of electoral reforms have put resources behind the idea in multiple jurisdictions.

“There are funders who are interested in the success of these reforms anywhere they can find success, to demonstrate that they can work. There’s going to be some overlap with what’s going on in Massachusetts and what people have done in other places,” he said. “It’s not likely a grand conspiracy. It’s just that people who like election reforms like election reforms, and they probably like them in Massachusetts and they probably like them in other places.”

Jesse Littlewood, the Yes on 3 campaign manager, argued that supporters are also drawing a high volume of small-dollar donations in addition to sizable contributions from donors who have backed the idea in multiple states. Campaign finance records show nearly 240 people have contributed less than $1,000 to the effort.

Backers are happy, Littlewood said, to have the chance to implement a reform in their home state they believe would improve electoral politics everywhere. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” he said.

Supporters of the ballot measure argue that it could give voters more choices in the state’s notoriously uncompetitive elections by ensuring that decisions are not effectively made in lower-turnout partisan primary elections. But opponents, an unusual alliance that includes both major parties as well as many progressives and labor unions, contend that the proposed reforms would instead give wealthy donors — like those funding the question itself — greater sway.

“We started our campaign with conversations from the activists on the ground in Colorado and Arizona about how their community groups beat back private equity,” said Berg Powers, one of the chief voices arguing against the measure. “For these donors, it is about finding places they can change the electoral system to their benefit because they keep losing results.”

Allen has defended tapping into wealthy backers as a legitimate strategy, arguing that their resources can help voters reclaim power from entrenched politicians and party bosses. She said she has known both Peeler and Ian Simmons, another donor, for years stemming back to their shared work fighting to unwind the damage of the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates for nearly unlimited money in politics.

“When I started moving in this direction, setting up a ballot committee, they were the first two people that I went to and said, ‘This is what I’m setting up a committee to do. Would you help? And would you help me find friends?’” Allen told CommonWealth Beacon in early October.

Before the current proposal took off, Allen and the group she launched, Partners in Democracy, pursued a different way to reshape elections. In 2023, proponents filed three proposed ballot measures: one allowing same-day voter registration, another prohibiting spending by corporations with a sizable foreign ownership share, and a third with a combined ranked-choice voting and all-party primary system from which the top five candidates would advance, roughly similar to the one in place in Alaska.

Allen was the first donor to that nascent effort, contributing $30,000 from the campaign account she used in her unsuccessful gubernatorial run and another $50,000 she said she took from her retirement fund. But it quickly came to a halt. Organizers did not get enough support to continue the voter registration campaign, and the attorney general’s office ruled the other two questions ineligible to advance. The idea remained idle until last year, when proponents rolled out the more streamlined primary election reform question that voters will decide next week.

In recent weeks, Allen has said she’s grown frustrated by the tenor of debate about the wealthy donors backing the campaign, arguing that it minimizes her effort to pursue reforms in two separate ballot question cycles.

“At some point, you have to ask the question: Why does everybody keep trying to invisibilize my role? Do people think a Black woman can’t have an idea?” she said. “That is essentially the message that I think people are beginning to develop. I’ve been working on this literally for years, and I’ve been working in the democracy reform space for years.”

As voters head to the polls, Allen’s work will continue to be aided by her deep-pocketed friends.