This November, Massachusetts voters can decide whether our elections are working for them, or whether they are mostly working for the people already in power.
Ballot Questions
Posted inBallot Questions
Odd bedfellows: Progressive critics join Democratic, Republican party bosses to oppose election reform ballot question
“It’s not that our current system is good. It’s that this alternate one is worse,” says Jonathan Cohn, policy director for Progressive Mass.
Posted inState Government
Signature cases add fuel to calls for ballot access reform
Legislative negotiators are finalizing the details of a bill requiring more frequent financial disclosures for statewide ballot question campaigns and implementing guardrails around the use of paid signature gatherers.
Posted inBallot Questions
An effort to boost nature, backed by big-money donors, lands in the middle of Mass. ballot question mania
As the campaign shifts from ballot-qualifying to general election mode, what the end result will be of all the money raised and spent, all the signatures collected and ads likely to come, and all the potential friction introduced with Beacon Hill — even if the question passes this fall — is for now unclear.
Posted inBallot Questions
Healey throws support behind conservation ballot question
Asked if she has a position on any of the questions yet, Healey told GBH’s Jim Braude and Margery Eagan, “Not on all of them, and you know, there are some that I’ve sort of taken a closer look at as a matter of priority,” before mentioning the conservation measure.
Posted inBallot Questions
On second thought: Late-moving legislative action injects ‘ambiguity’ into ballot questions
Legislative leaders opted not to engage in serious negotiations with initiative petition proponents earlier in the year, when a compromise might have averted measures going to the ballot. And now, they’re weighing last-minute action that could reshape or even upend a pair of decisions voters will make.
Posted inOpinion
Massachusetts is making free speech a guessing game
This isn’t about whether donor disclosure has a role in elections; It’s about whether government can expand those rules through vague interpretations that leave ordinary civic organizations guessing where the legal line is.
Posted inPolitics
Political Notebook: House Speaker foretells Senate tax swerve
He was joking when he described “fortune-telling” as a preferred pastime, but House Speaker Ron Mariano still managed to divine the way electoral politics would affect a Senate tax cap proposal.
Posted inPublic Records
Senate ready to open access to legislative records, muddying outlook for ballot question
The Senate will take up a bill next week that would subject the governor’s office and Legislature to public records requirements, but huge questions still linger about how legislative action would affect a question on the November ballot seeking a similar goal.
Posted inPolitics
Eleventh-hour Senate move could upend tax rebate ballot question
Democrats in the Senate appear to be coalescing around a late-term push to repeal the law known as Chapter 62F, in the process inviting incendiary anger from groups that want government to control its spending habits.
Posted inBallot Questions
Marijuana question survives as all nine ballot questions get their numbers
It’s official: voters will face nine statewide ballot questions, tying the record last reached in 1994, and the list will include whether to undo recreational cannabis legalization.
Posted inBallot Questions
The tricky calculus of designing a ballot with nine questions
While law sets clear patterns for most of the ballot, officials need to lean more on the skills used by magazine or newspaper layout editors when it comes to statewide questions.
Posted inBallot Questions
Pot advocate looks to boot marijuana question from ballot
The campaign only qualified for the ballot by a margin of 122 signatures in the most recent, final round, leaving little room for error should regulators find that the claims carry weight.
Posted inBallot Questions
Pro-cannabis campaign plans to counter ‘stuffy dudes’ with the grassroots
The Stop the Repeal campaign will rely on grassroots efforts to encourage Bay Staters to “vote no” against the ballot measure funded by “out-of-state” interests, said chair Ryan Dominguez, the executive director of the Massachusetts Cannabis Coalition.
Posted inBallot Questions
How did some of Massachusetts’s buzziest ballot campaigns get tripped up in court?
Three ballot measures are dead because they ran afoul of Article 48 — the part of the state Constitution that governs the ballot process. A bad summary, a forbidden subject, and an attempt to direct the Legislature kept them from voters.
Posted inState Government
How the House’s sausage-making put transparency groups in a tough spot
A trio of good-government and transparency organizations backed the House’s proposal to craft a new public records framework for the Legislature, but they’re straining to avoid the riptide of the audit-the-Legislature debate that representatives tied to the same bill.
Posted inBallot Questions
Mass. high court strikes rent control question from ballot
The decision averts a months-long season of aggressive campaigning that seemed sure to generate tens of millions of dollars in spending on attack ads and dire warnings about economic upheaval.
Posted inBallot Questions
Mass. primary election overhaul eligible for November ballot, SJC rules
Should Massachusetts run its elections more like California? That question is cleared to appear on the ballot, according to the state’s highest court, possibly teeing up a major shift in our notoriously uncompetitive races.
Posted inOpinion
DiZoglio’s campaign to audit the Legislature is fueled by misinformation, political ambition, and personal attacks
There has been no better example in Massachusetts politics of the chasm that exists between what is actually true, and what the loudest voices are willing to say for their own personal gain, than the legislative audit spectacle.
Posted inBallot Questions
SJC blocks high-stakes income tax cut question from the November ballot
In a blockbuster ruling just as ballot measure campaigns submit their final signatures, Massachusetts’s highest court cut the fuse of a revenue bomb that was set to blow $5 billion out of the state budget. An initiative aiming to cut income taxes is blocked from the ballot because of errors in the attorney general’s summary.
Posted inBallot Questions
Powerful real estate group says it’s open to rent control compromise
With just two weeks until a controversial rent control ballot measure could be locked in, a flurry of negotiations — and pockets of sustained resistance — puts Beacon Hill in a tricky position.
Posted inCourts
SJC keeps recreational marijuana repeal in the mix for November
The first of four expected rulings about ballot question eligibility went in favor of the campaign, with justices deciding that a push to reverse the 2016 statewide pot vote was properly certified and summarized.
Posted inOpinion
The House’s anti-transparency bill
This bill is not transparency. It is a legislative workaround dressed up as reform.
Posted inState Government
Transparency fight escalates as House votes to limit its exposure to audit, public records requests
The House’s top Republican described the controversial bill as an “[expletive] sandwich with extra pickles.”
