THE NEW MASSACHUSETTS state auditor won the Democratic nomination for the job in 2022 with an aggressive campaign centered on making the auditor the chief legislative transparency officer at the State House. At present, state Auditor Diana DiZoglio is attempting to sue the state Legislature into cooperating with her, while simultaneously supporting a proposed 2024 ballot initiative to give her express statutory authority to audit the Legislature. It’s clear that everything is on the table in the auditor’s determined efforts to fulfill her campaign promises.

Her campaign promises about leveraging the auditor’s authority to push Beacon Hill policymakers to be more transparent was, in one sense, a no-brainer for Democratic primary voters. The impression that DiZoglio’s ambitions might exceed the legal authority of the state auditor’s office was clearly not disqualifying for attentive progressive voters, while at the same time, it wasn’t clear at all to (much less attentive) average voters.

It turns out that, to her credit, DiZoglio does not intend to soften the approach to getting the job that she displayed on the campaign trail now that she has the job. Unfortunately, her ambition to make the state auditor into a taxpayer-financed legislative transparency cop, authorized to investigate and expose what she decides are flaws in the Legislature’s policymaking procedures, contradicts the design of the Massachusetts Constitution, which creates a clear separation of powers between the branches of government as well as (and more importantly for the matter at hand) clear legislative supremacy in legislative-executive relations at the State House. Neither the state’s charter nor general laws suggest that the state auditor ought to be anything other than an auditor.

The job of the Massachusetts state auditor is to conduct financial audits of all state government departments. If we include the Legislature as one of those departments, a debatable proposition in and of itself, then the auditor would be authorized to conduct a financial audit of all expenditures of public money made by the Legislature. In her public comments about the type of “comprehensive legislative audit” she is presently seeking the authority to conduct, DiZoglio has cited the auditor’s annual report from 1922 as an example. However, that 1922 report is a financial audit only. It does not include discussion or evaluation of the Legislature’s policymaking policies and processes.

All of her campaign rhetoric made clear that DiZoglio intends to use her office to attack the lack of policymaking transparency that has always characterized the legislative process on Beacon Hill.

DiZoglio is demanding that legislative leaders give her whatever she needs “to conduct a wide-ranging review” of legislative activity, including “information about active and pending bills, the processes for appointing members to committees, and how the rules, policies, and procedures get made.”

Her posture on this seems to be that total legislative transparency, not just financial transparency, is an indisputable public good. But that’s not true. What is true is that DiZoglio brings progressive, participatory assumptions about the conduct of democratic governance to her elective service, while legislative leaders, as well as most rank-in-file legislators, bring less progressive and participatory democratic assumptions to their elective service. For them, high quality deliberative democratic policymaking sometimes requires secrecy. Unfortunately for Auditor DiZoglio, the framers of the Massachusetts Constitution also did not share her assumptions.

Settling this perennial and very debatable argument about democracy is definitely not the job of the state auditor. It is the job of politicians, political activists, and voters. While the auditor is free, arguably even obliged, to make her understanding of democracy clear to voters, she is not authorized to legally embed that understanding into the official job description of the state auditor.

The auditor cannot, with the legal authority and resources of her job as a constitutional officer, tell legislators how to make public policy any more than she can tell state judges how to decide cases. At best, with regard to the Legislature, her job is to ensure a public accounting of any and all expenditures of public money from accounts controlled by the Legislature.

For her part, DiZoglio has argued that the voters who responded to her campaign by electing her provided all the authority she needs to enact her expansive understanding of the state auditor’s authority and job description. This argument is unpersuasive even if the underlying assumptions about democratic authority are accepted.

DiZoglio was elected in a Democratic primary that saw less than 22 percent turnout and faced only token opposition in the general election’s lowest visibility statewide contest, making her claims to a statewide voter mandate unreasonable at best. As such, even those who voted for her did not likely understand her true intensions with respect to auditing the Legislature.

The fact is, average voters do not pay much attention to races for auditor or to the auditor’s conduct while in office. Furthermore, I can assure you that, as a high-information voter not entirely unsympathetic to the auditor’s critique of the Legislature, my own vote for DiZoglio last November did not reflect my agreement with her present efforts to expand the state auditor’s authority.

I believe that the auditor’s heart is in the right place. Good government activists have been railing against the lack of transparency and iron-fisted control of legislative leaders on Beacon Hill forever, which is perfectly appropriate, even laudable. But the state’s voters have nevertheless remained unconvinced that there is something fundamentally wrong with business-as-usual on Beacon Hill.

Bay State voters actually approve of the performance of the Legislature and prefer political moderation and interest-based compromise to the more ideologically motivated and confrontational politics often practiced by progressive good-government reformers on the left and conservative anti-tax activists and culture warriors on the right.

Polling just released showing broad public support for the auditor’s proposed ballot initiative, designed to expressly empower her to conduct a “legislative audit” without providing any explanation or clarification of the limits of that term, hardly signals a real public mandate for expanding the auditor’s authority beyond financial accounting.

The UMass poll that reported 67 percent of its respondents would vote yes to a ballot question seeking to “allow the state auditor to assess the performance of the state Legislature and recommend ways to improve the state Legislature” only reinforces the fact that the boundaries of the authority being sought are conspicuously unclear.

What could seem more benign to average (i.e., low information) voters than assessing the performance of the Legislature and recommending improvement? That doesn’t sound unreasonable. Nothing in the proposed ballot initiative or the UMass poll question described above even hints at potential damage to the preservation of the legislative supremacy and separation of powers outlined in the state constitution. After all, the auditor only wants the ability to make recommendations, not order changes…right? Well…sure…sort of. DiZoglio wants to legally force legislative leaders into full compliance with her office’s efforts by making any privilege claims by legislators legally untenable.

If successful, I’m afraid DiZoglio will unintentionally damage the credibility of future state auditors with respect to their real job, which is to guarantee the financial responsibility and accountability of state government departments.

If future auditors are empowered to use their legal authority to “assess the performance of the state Legislature and recommend changes” as a pretext for launching political broadsides against legislative leaders with the imprimatur of the state auditor, politics at the State House could begin to resemble the polarized quagmires presently on full display in Washington, DC,  and other state houses across the country.

With this in mind, news that Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, a hard right wing outfit that masquerades as a “fiscal watchdog,” has joined the voter signature drive to advance the auditor’s ballot initiative is a foreboding sign. It should be seen as a clear warning about the partisan and ideological extremism that DiZoglio’s efforts to become the official political transparency cop on Beacon Hill may be unintentionally inviting into the Massachusetts State House.

Jerold Duquette is a professor of political science at Central Connecticut State University, co-founder and senior contributor at MassPoliticsProfs.org, and the author of many scholarly works on Massachusetts government and politics, including, most recently, The Politics of Massachusetts Exceptionalism: Reputation Meets Reality, which he co-edited with UMass Boston political scientist Erin O’Brien.