Newsletter · Week 1 Nine questions. Your vote in November. Let's break it down! Why is your ballot so long this year? Here's how these questions got there, and more importantly, who paid to put them there.

This November, Massachusetts voters will answer NINE statewide ballot questions, more than you’re used to seeing on a single ballot.

The list of questions covers a wide range of issues this year: Public records, unionizing public defenders, primaries voting systems, voter registration, a Reagan-era tax limit, conservation land, minimum lot sizes, marijuana, and gun control.

Every question on the ballot is there because somebody spent time and money to put it there. Once you understand how a question gets on the ballot, you start to see who has the power to put one there. That’s what I’ll cover in this newsletter.

For the next five weeks, I'm going to walk you through all nine questions. I'll share what each one actually does, who is behind it, and how I'm voting and why.

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Three roads to your ballot

The Massachusetts Constitution gives voters three main ways to put a question on the ballot. The rules come from Article 48, which was added over 100 years ago. It’s a tool used when a constituency isn’t happy with the lack of movement in the State House.

Road 1: Propose a new law (an "initiative petition"). This is the most common road. Questions 1 through 8 this year all got on the ballot this way. A group writes a law, gets the Attorney General to approve it, collects signatures, and then gives the Legislature a chance to pass it. If the Legislature does nothing, the group collects more signatures and the question goes to voters. During this year-long process, the language also needs to survive any legal challenges that anyone can file to remove the question from the ballot.

Road 2: Change the state Constitution (an "amendment"). This road is a much longer process. A citizen-proposed amendment has to win support from at least 25% of lawmakers in two separate legislative sessions before it reaches the ballot. That takes years and it is rare, but it can be powerful. The Fair Share Amendment, our millionaire's tax, is the best recent example. Voters passed it in 2022, and it now brings in billions of dollars a year for schools and transportation.

Road 3: Repeal a law the Legislature just passed (a "referendum"). Think of this as the "just say no" road. A group does not need to write any new law. It just asks voters to throw out a law that was already passed by the legislature and signed by the Governor. There is no Attorney General review of new language and no court fight over drafting. Question 9, the gun safety law, takes this approach.

Each road also has different signature thresholds based on percentages of votes cast statewide in the most recent Governor’s election. Here is a summary of the requirements for each of the 3 roads:

Road	Signatures needed	Other hurdles
New law (Q1–Q8)	74,574 in the fall, then 12,429 more the next spring	AG must certify it; Legislature gets first crack; courts can strike it
Constitutional amendment	74,574 in the fall, no second round	25% of lawmakers must vote yes in two sessions
Repeal a new law (Q9)	37,287 to make the ballot; 49,716 to pause the law until the vote	Must file within 90 days of the law passing

One more rule for collecting signatures: no more than one quarter of the signatures can come from any single county. This means you cannot just camp out in population centers in or near Boston. You need people collecting signatures across the state.

Who can actually afford to play?

On paper, anyone with 10 friends can start a ballot question. In real life, it takes a massive amount of organizing and/or hefty funding.

There are two ways to collect 75,000+ signatures. You can build a huge volunteer network, which is what the rent control campaign (that ended up getting thrown off the ballot by a lawsuit) did. Organizers turned in over 124,000 signatures with volunteers in every corner of the state. But more commonly, most ballot questions pay for signature collection. Massachusetts lets campaigns hire paid signature gatherers, and well-funded groups spend anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars to a few million to qualify.

Then the legal hurdles start.

Step one: the Attorney General. The AG has to certify that a question follows the Constitution. For example, all its parts have to be "related" to each other, and some topics are off-limits.

Step two: the courts. Even after the AG signs off, opponents can sue in the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC). This is where money really talks. This year, three certified questions were knocked off the ballot:

Rent control. Corporate landlords sued over a one-line exemption for religious buildings. In June, the SJC agreed and struck it, even though polls showed about 6 in 10 voters supported capping rent increases. Slashing the income tax from 5% to 4%. Labor unions sued, arguing the AG's summary was misleading because it left out that the question would also cut the tax on capital gains. The court agreed. Legislative stipend reform. This would have limited the extra pay leadership hands out to loyal lawmakers. The SJC said it dealt with the Legislature's internal rules, which voters cannot change this way.

This is not new. In 2022, Uber and Lyft spent millions on a question to keep treating drivers as contractors instead of employees. The SJC threw it out because it hid a second, unrelated policy in vague language at the end. And in 2018, the court struck the first version of the millionaire's tax. Organizers didn't quit. They went back to the Legislature, got it passed as a constitutional amendment, and voters approved it in 2022.

Step three: the Legislature can take the question up. Before a new-law question reaches you, lawmakers can pass it, pass their own version, or ignore it. Most often they ignore it. But sometimes a ballot threat forces a deal. In 2018, labor groups were headed to the ballot with a $15 minimum wage and paid family and medical leave. Business groups had a question to cut the sales tax. The Legislature brokered a "grand bargain": workers got $15 and paid leave, business dropped its sales tax cut, and all three questions went away. Workers won big, but they also lost time-and-a-half pay on Sundays and public sector workers were cut out of paid family and medical leave in the deal. That kind of negotiation is rare. This year, lawmakers did not act on a single question.

The nine questions at a glance

Here are all the State Ballot Questions in one table, using the official summaries from the Secretary of State. I'll go deep on each one in the coming weeks.

#	Topic	A YES vote would...
1	Public records	Open up most records of the Legislature and Governor's office to the public
2	Public defenders	Let public defenders and other staff at the state's public defender agency form a union
3	"Top-two" primaries	Replace party primaries with one primary where the top two finishers advance, even if they're from the same party
4	Election Day registration	Let eligible voters register or update their address at the polls on Election Day
5	State revenue cap	Tighten the cap on how much the state can collect, count millionaire's tax money under it, and refund anything over the cap
6	Conservation fund	Send sales tax on sporting goods, RVs, and golf to a new land conservation fund
7	Lot sizes	Allow single-family homes on lots of 5,000 square feet or more where there's public water and sewer
8	Marijuana	Repeal legal retail sales of recreational marijuana
9	Gun safety law	Keep the 2024 gun safety law (a NO vote repeals it)

A quick tip on Question 9: it is a repeal question, voting YES keeps the current law. Voting NO throws it out.

Why I think this process needs reform

Ballot questions are supposed to be the people's tool. When the Legislature won't act, voters can go around it. That's a real power, and I believe in it. It's how we won the millionaire's tax, and won the $15 minimum wage in 2018, and paid family medical leave.

But here is the thing: the tool works better for whoever can fund a million dollars, ie. corporate actors, local billionaires and oligarchs. This is why nearly every 2-4 years, large businesses use ballot questions to threaten cutting taxes and thereby gutting public funding for schools, healthcare, transportation, and infrastructure.

It’s simply blackmail and you can learn more about extreme corporate greed in a video I made before this nasty ballot question got kicked off the ballot.

Check out my MAGA tech bro explainer video →

Some states, like California, make it so easy to get on the ballot that corporations can buy their way onto it every cycle. Massachusetts goes the other way. Our bar is high, and the legal gauntlet is long. That sounds like it should protect us from big money. In practice, it cuts both ways.

A grassroots campaign can do everything right, like the rent control campaign did, and still get knocked off by a lawsuit that corporate landlords can easily afford. Meanwhile, business groups can use the threat of a ballot question, like a massive tax cut, to pressure lawmakers into giveaways. And a well-funded campaign can simply pay its way through the signature stage. That’s why some states ban, limit, or regulate paid signature gathering. I’ll be filing legislation on this because currently Massachusetts has no material restrictions on the ability for corporate interests to get a question on the ballot.

This year we saw over 40 proposals filed. Nine made it. The ones that survived were mostly the ones with deep pockets or the strongest organizing. I want a process where a question lives or dies based on what voters think, not on who can afford it. I'll be writing more about what that reform should look like.

In the meantime, the best defense is an informed voter. That's you. Next week, I’ll dig into the first few questions.

Now that we look toward the general election in less than two months, I need your help to maintain this momentum and keep our campaign moving forward.

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In solidarity,