THERE’S BEEN an awful lot of sound and fury from top Democrats when it comes to the long-stalled, voter-approved law empowering the state auditor to give the Legislature a closer look.

They say allowing the auditor to probe the House and Senate would violate the sanctity of the state Constitution, which requires a separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches. They say both chambers already undergo financial audits by outside firms and post the results online. And they say Auditor Diana DiZoglio, a former representative and senator herself, is motivated by personal animus toward her former bosses, rendering her a walking conflict of interest.

Yet all of the headlines and handwringing over the past two years have not moved the needle among voters, not even by a single point.

A new CommonWealth Beacon/MassINC Polling Group survey (Toplines | Crosstabs) found that 72 percent of likely voters support explicitly allowing the state auditor to audit the Legislature — exactly the same share that voted in support of a 2024 ballot question writing that power into state law. Only 7 percent of respondents oppose the law, and 21 percent said they are unsure.

Informed that the support margin in the poll mirrored the 2024 vote, DiZoglio’s first response was to chuckle.

“It’s certainly on theme,” she told CommonWealth Beacon. “We continue to push for the voter-mandated audit that 72 percent voted for, and as the poll demonstrates, that push is not waning. People are just as motivated as they were in 2024.”

Consensus among the electorate has not extended to the House and Senate. For more than a year following the question’s approval, top Democrats in each chamber refused to comply with DiZoglio’s newly empowered outreach, prompting the auditor to sue them earlier this year.

An initial skirmish before the state’s highest court brought little resolution. A case focused on the constitutionality of DiZoglio’s initial request for a limited batch of documents — official legislative budgets, financial audits of the House and Senate, information about the “balance forward” line items used to carry funds into another year, and monetary settlements between the branches and current or former employees — is now pending in Suffolk Superior Court.

In a brief filed in that case, the House’s legal counsel argued that DiZoglio’s January 2025 request infringes on the separation of powers between the branches and violates a section of the state constitution declaring that legislative speech cannot be the target of any legal action. Furthermore, the House’s top attorney contended, the court is not empowered to order the chamber to make any changes.

Meanwhile, the Senate argues that it should not be subject to the lawsuit because its leaders already voted to provide the documents in question to DiZoglio — even while insisting they had no legal obligation to fulfill other audit requests. The House followed up that vote with its own legislation that would limit the scope of any probe by the state auditor’s office, in perpetuity, only to the subset of documents DiZoglio outlined in her very first request.

“The House has long believed that the audit ballot question violates the state constitution – a position that we have held since before the question passed in 2024,” House Speaker Ron Mariano said in a statement to CommonWealth Beacon. “While the House remains opposed to a politically motivated audit conducted in violation of the Constitution, we did pass legislation earlier this year providing the Auditor with the authority to conduct a financial audit of the House, and we continue to undergo an audit conducted by an independent auditing firm every year.”

Gray Milkowski, a spokesperson for Senate President Karen Spilka, noted that the chamber’s latest legislative rules made more information about committee votes available because the Senate “understands that transparency is important to voters.”

“In addition, the Senate continues to put all of its expenditures—including payroll and payments to vendors—online for every resident of the Commonwealth to see and review,” he said.

With implementation in limbo, the law has morphed into a political utility tool. “Where the hell is our audit” or references to “the 72 percent” have become stand-in responses to a whole host of complaints about Beacon Hill, even if addressing such a grievance is not within the scope of a routine audit of one government entity by another.

Republicans, who are outnumbered in the Legislature seven to one, made a point to visibly embrace both the audit law and also DiZoglio herself, the only statewide Democrat who did not draw a GOP challenger this fall.

But among voters, support is massive across different ideologies. For all the complaints top House and Senate Democrats make, 70 percent of Democratic likely voters back the audit law, according to the new CommonWealth Beacon survey. Seventy-nine percent of Republicans support it, as do 72 percent of those not enrolled in either major party.

The poll involved 800 likely voters surveyed between September 14 and September 22. It has a credibility interval of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Voters have another legislative transparency decision to make this fall. DiZoglio and her allies are pushing a new ballot question that would subject the House, Senate, and governor’s office to the state’s public records law, with the auditor pitching it as a natural follow-up to her winning campaign two years ago.

Already, that idea has been caught up in the gears of Beacon Hill. Over the summer, while the ballot question was already well on track to land on the November ballot, both branches approved legislation creating a new public records framework for themselves. Depending on where the final compromise bill lands, it could supersede whatever voters decide at the polls.

DiZoglio suggested she could take legal action if that comes to pass.

“The Legislature, in doing this, is signaling to the voters of this Commonwealth that they do not respect the will of the electorate and that election results don’t matter to them,” she said.