AS LAWMAKERS MADE a final push last month at the end of formal sessions for the year, the state’s real political energy wasn’t centered under the Golden Dome. It was in supermarket parking lots and coffee shops where signature gatherers made a final dash to gather the required support to place ballot questions before voters next year. A potential record number of 2026 ballot measures have cleared that significant hurdle, setting the stage for a second half of the two-year legislative session consumed by outside pressure for policy change. 

CommonWealth Beacon reporters Jennifer Smith and Chris Lisinski dug into the dawning ballot season and reviewed the end-of-session scramble on The Codcast.  

Voters could see as many as a dozen ballot questions at the polls next November. Ballot referendums – inherently blunt instruments – are tools to prod lawmakers to take action as much as efforts to create law themselves. And several take aim at the state’s notoriously opaque and uncompetitive political system. 

Ballot efforts to subject the governor’s office, the House, and the Senate to public records laws and rein in legislative stipends are successor referendums of a sort, after last cycle’s successful initiative authorizing the state auditor to audit the Legislature, which has stalled. “Thematically, all of this falls under the exact same umbrella that has long been hoisted,” Lisinski noted, “criticizing Massachusetts as one of the least transparent state legislatures in the country.”  

Both legislative chambers okayed bills to retool the embattled Cannabis Control Commission. 

“Legislative leaders have tried to downplay the degree to which the controversies at the commission, specifically between chair Shannon O’Brien and Treasurer Deb Goldberg, prompted this legislation,” Lisinski said. “They’ve really pitched the bill as just a necessary update, so many years into this industry, to buff out some rough areas that practice has shown don’t work as well as needed. That being said, we’re all free and independent thinkers, and we can connect the dots that this significant industry overhaul has only started to move now after a very long series of controversies.” 

Meanwhile, a ballot measure that could come before voters next November seeks to recriminalize recreational cannabis just a decade after voters took to the ballot box to legalize it. 

The ballot question would roll back the clock to before the 2016 ballot measure that legalized recreational use of marijuana. While proponents say they have submitted enough signatures to clear the first hurdle – not without controversy – Bay State voters have not signaled a broad appetite to undo the earlier measure. A 2024 poll on cannabis policy from the MassINC Polling Group, which is partially owned by CommonWealth Beacon’s publisher MassINC, found 65 percent of respondents said legalizing marijuana in the state was “the right decision.” 

November 19 marked the end of this year’s formal sessions under internal legislative rules. Major bills that didn’t reach the governor are likely on hold until 2026. But Massachusetts lawmaking is famously backloaded—most major action happens in the final weeks of the second year, not the first. 

As lawmakers downshift into informal sessions for the remainder of 2025, the Legislature cleared a $2 billion closeout budget last month for fiscal 2025. Beyond MassHealth funding and money for sheriffs and World Cup tourism, the bill imposed new oversight on sheriff spending and decoupled state vaccine schedules from federal recommendations – a preemptive move against potential changes under vaccine-wary Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

The House punted on its energy bill after attempting to rewrite Gov. Maura Healey’s affordability proposal to weaken the state’s 2030 decarbonization targets. Budget chief Aaron Michlewitz pulled it after strong blowback. 

On the episode, Smith and Lisinski discuss what made it through the final 2025 formal session (2:50), what didn’t (9:00), and the potential record ballot season (12:30).