THE IDEA BEHIND the ballot question sounds simple enough: Rein in the system that lets the Legislature’s leaders hand out extra pay to committee chairs and others as a tool to reward loyalty or punish dissent.

There have long been concerns that the current system, which allows the House speaker and Senate president to make dozens of appointments that come with big pay boosts, concentrates too much power at the top of what are supposed to be representative legislative bodies. Critics argue that the status quo allows legislative leaders to dole out lucrative titles to allies as a way of policing members with tens of thousands of dollars of extra pay on the line.

That seemed to be the case in 2017, when then-House Speaker Robert DeLeo demoted Rep. Russell Holmes from his committee vice-chair position — in the process taking away the extra $5,200 per year attached to the role — after the Boston Democrat questioned the insular process of deciding who wields the gavel.

Fed up by that dynamic and by the proliferation of committee chairs who earn significant money for jobs with unclear responsibilities, a group of agitated former legislators and transparency activists decided to go to the ballot and seek voter support for changing the system.

“We don’t mind paying extra money for real work, but we want it to be real work that’s done in the public eye, where people can actually see what’s going on, see who’s taking what positions,” said Jon Hecht, a former state representative who’s now one of the leaders of the campaign.

Reformers aren’t looking to upend the system entirely, but in reaching for a scalpel to fix what they say is broken instead of a sledgehammer, the campaign might have created even more questions and obstacles for itself.

The question coursing toward the November ballot would not outright eliminate stipends, as an earlier draft proposed. Instead, it would reduce the value of the highest-paying stipends and the number available while also forcing significant changes to the way the Legislature moves bills through the pipeline. Those new requirements, analysts say, could be easily gamed by leaders to maximize the number of representatives and senators who earn more and add fuel to the argument that outsiders pushing the ballot question want to overstep the separation of powers enshrined in the state constitution.

Lawmakers are already warning that the stipends question crosses a constitutional line, the same charge they have levied against Auditor Diana DiZoglio’s voter-backed, still-stalled bid to probe the Legislature and another ballot question proposed for this fall that would subject Beacon Hill to the public records law.

The Senate last week asked the state’s highest court to examine whether the stipend question is constitutional, arguing that it “would violate and intrude upon the ability of the Senate and House of Representatives to set their own rules of proceedings.”

James DiTullio, the Senate’s legal counsel, has said the question effectively seeks to amend legislative rules — a topic ballot questions are not allowed to touch. “Such an attempt to alter internal legislative functions is entirely inconsistent with the Senate’s constitutional authority to make its own rules and manage its own proceedings,” he wrote in a letter submitted with the attorney general’s office in August.

Legislator pay has three primary components today. All 160 representatives and 40 senators earn the same base annual salary under the Constitution, currently $82,044 and adjusted every two years for inflation. Every lawmaker also receives an office and travel stipend, currently worth $22,430 for those who live within 50 miles of the State House and $29,907 for those who live further away.

All of the existing disparity, which allows the speaker to earn nearly two and a half times as much as dozens of the lowest-paid reps, comes from stipends attached to leadership and committee posts, which are unilaterally decided by top Democrats and Republicans in each chamber. Today, three-quarters of sitting lawmakers earn thousands or tens of thousands of dollars more per year thanks to those jobs.

Those stipends, outlined in state law, also increase with inflation each two-year term. They range considerably: the House speaker and Senate president currently an extra $119,631 per year, while the smallest boost goes to committee vice chairs, who qualify for another $7,776 annually.

Under the ballot question, the speaker and Senate president, chairs of the Senate and House ways and means committees, majority and minority leaders, and a handful of assistant leaders and vice chairs would receive smaller pay boosts.

Many committee chairs would also continue to receive extra pay, but the ballot question would create a new eligibility requirement: those bumps would only go to the chairs of committees to which the House and Senate refer at least 50 bills by March 1 in the first year of a two-year term. That means that the leaders of panels who get fewer than 50 bills sent their way in the early months of business would not qualify for extra pay.

The new threshold would eliminate the tens of thousands of dollars currently awarded to heads of committees that rarely meet in public and do not play much of a role in advancing legislation, like the House Committee on Intergovernmental Affairs. “It has to be a committee that’s doing real work, and that has a significant enough of a volume of work to justify paying more,” said Hecht.

However, that trigger could also exclude some arguably high-profile panels. This session, the Economic Development Committee — a panel that vets many measures related to job growth and business competitiveness, and this week scaled back Gov. Maura Healey’s proposal to deploy state dollars toward research sectors that have lost federal funding — received only 40 bills by March 1, 2025, according to a CommonWealth Beacon analysis of bill data collected by Legiscan. The Bonding Committee only gets a handful of bills in its purview every term, but those that do flow through the panel envision billions of dollars in state borrowing to fund investments in transportation infrastructure, higher education, and more.

Evan Horowitz, executive director of the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University, said the 50-bill threshold creates a “gameable target.”

“I assume if this question passes, there will be a compliance officer in the Legislature who is counting and is making sure that everybody who is slated to get a stipend gets the right number of bills pointed in their direction to get the stipend,” he said. “I don’t know that it accomplishes anything if it’s that gameable.”

Hecht, who served as a state representative from 2009 to 2021, conceded that it’s “certainly possible” legislative leaders would begin to decide where to send bills in order to maximize stipends.

And if lawmakers felt that a committee would be unfairly excluded from extra chair pay as a result of the 50-bill metric, Hecht said, “they could always come back after next November and amend the statute.”

“But then they’d have to justify it to the public,” he said. “The problem we have now is there’s no check and there’s no accountability for how this extra money is being doled out.”

Another component of the proposal would tie some of what lawmakers earn to whether they shift a greater portion of their work into public view.

Committee chairs who earn extra pay could be guaranteed half of their stipend as part of their normal paychecks. The other half would only be disbursed at the end of the year if two conditions are fulfilled: the panel they lead held both a public hearing and a public “mark-up session” on every bill by a certain date, and any committee recommendation on a bill came from a majority vote in a public session where a quorum of lawmakers was present. The speaker and Senate president, as well as a handful of deputies, would also lose part of their stipends for every panel that fails to comply with the proposed markup and voting requirements.

For decades, that work took place in the open, with panels weighing legislation and offering amendments during a live discussion and series of votes. A handful of executive sessions have taken place as recently as 2021 and 2019, but they are an extreme rarity. Today, most redrafts are performed in private with electronic votes.

“This is not how legislatures are supposed to work, or how they actually work, either here in Massachusetts at the local level or in other states,” Hecht said. “They’re supposed to have markup sessions where members can say what they think about bills and vote on them. Now that none of that happens, everything’s done between the [committee] chair and leadership, and the bill goes on to Ways and Means where, again, it’s all behind closed doors.”

Some chairs could arguably have a lot more work than others for the same pay. The Judiciary Committee, for example, received 740 bills by March 1, 2025, while the Agriculture Committee received 58 in the same span.

Hecht acknowledged that lawmakers could simply opt not to convene markup sessions or hold live committee votes. “But then,” he added, “we don’t have to pay you extra.”

Lawmakers are wary of forcing a change to how they review and advance bills. In their request for a non-binding Supreme Judicial Court opinion, senators questioned whether the stipend measure would “intrude on the Senate’s ability to set its own rules of proceedings” enshrined in the constitution.

Andrew London, a partner at law firm Foley Hoag who has worked on ballot question challenges before the SJC, said he sees potential for a “solid argument that this [proposal] impedes the House and Senate’s constitutional authority to set their own rules.”

“Incentivizing public hearings and public markups and the number of bills that go to committees and when they report those bills — those all get deeply entangled into the Legislature’s own rule process,” London said in an interview. (He’s representing plaintiffs in a case challenging the eligibility of an all-party primary ballot question, but is not involved in any measures this cycle dealing with proposed legislative reforms.)

All 40 senators and 110 state representatives get pay bonuses of some kind as a result of leadership or committee posts, leaving just 50 reps without any, according to data provided by the state treasurer’s office.

The ballot question would simultaneously lower the ceiling so the top-paid lawmakers earn less, reduce the number of positions that qualify for significantly extra pay, and, by offering a new bump to all lawmakers who do not get a stipend, raise the floor so dozens of legislators, especially in the House, receive more than they do today.

Altogether, the question would shrink the gap between the highest- and lowest-paid lawmakers from nearly $120,000 to about $45,000, according to projections by ballot question supporters.

Several sitting lawmakers have quietly voiced frustration that the ballot question would curb earning potential at the upper limits, arguing that it’s in the public interest for the Legislature to pay competitively to attract the best talent to elected positions.

Like the successful 2024 question explicitly empowering the state auditor to probe the Legislature, the proposed stipend reform tries to channel public frustration with Beacon Hill into a material policy change in how the Legislature operates.

Also like the audit-the-Legislature measure, the long-term outlook for the proposal is rife with uncertainty. Given the constitutional concerns legislators have raised, there’s a chance measure falls into a legal black hole even if voters approve it, akin to the still-not-implemented audit law.

The Senate wants the SJC to produce a non-binding opinion on the question’s constitutionality, but lawmakers opted not to pursue a formal legal challenge, which leaves big question marks on the horizon.

Changing the Legislature from the outside, it turns out, is neither easy nor straightforward.