Jonathan Cohn, “An Abundance of Questions Coming to the November Ballot,” Fenway News, June 2026.
With the onset of spring weather in May came a biennial Massachusetts tradition: signature collectors outside the grocery store and at local events.
That’s because as soon as signature collection wrapped up for candidates running for office this year, it started up again for ballot questions. And we have a lot of them.
Last fall was only Round One for these questions. A record-breaking 11 ballot questions reached the necessary 74,574 certified signatures needed to advance. They began the new year as bills filed with the Legislature.
A special committee in the Legislature held hearings on all 11 of those questions, listening to proponents, opponents, nonpartisan experts, and members of the public. They decided not to take action on any of them. That means that the campaigns need to collect another 12,429 signatures between early May and mid-June, a much tighter window than Round One, but a lower threshold.
Unfortunately, one of the original 11 is no longer moving forward: the ballot initiative taking on the legislature’s hierarchical pay structure. Currently, legislators can more than double their pay through stipends attached to various leadership posts. Critics rightly deride these stipends as “loyalty pay,” given how they make their recipients indebted to the House and Senate leaders who dole them out. The State Senate, a bitter foe of the question, sought an advisory opinion from the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) on the question’s constitutionality, and SJC sided with them. The question’s backers are planning to regroup and try again next year.
So what are the remaining 10 questions you might see on clipboards in the coming weeks?
- Rent stabilization, i.e., limiting how much rent can increase each year to 5% or inflation (whichever is lower), with tailored exemptions for small landlords and new construction
- Limiting minimum lot sizes in order to eliminate zoning obstacles to the construction of starter homes in the suburbs
- Expanding the public records law to the Governor and Legislature (We’re the only state where the Governor and Legislature claim full exemption)
- Election Day Registration, i.e., enabling eligible voters to register to vote or update their registration at the polls (as New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, and Connecticut already allow). Our early September primaries put the need in stark relief.
- Replacing party primaries with all-party runoff elections like in California, a system Californians are thinking twice about amidst their chaotic gubernatorial election
- Reducing the state income tax from 5% to 4%, which would lead to a $5 billion cut to the state budget on top of looming cuts to health care and food assistance and disproportionately benefit the top 1%
- Tightening the revenue cap created by a 1986 ballot question, making it harder for the state to invest
- Enabling public defenders at the Committee for Public Counsel Service to form a union
- Recriminalizing recreational marijuana
- Dedicating funds from the existing state sales tax on sporting goods to a fund for protecting and conserving water and nature
Sound like a lot of ballot questions to keep track of? That’s not all of them.
The one question already guaranteed to be on the ballot is a referendum on the guns safety omnibus bill passed overwhelmingly by the Legislature in 2024. The bill modernized Massachusetts’ existing firearms laws to address issues such as untraceable “ghost guns,” strengthened the state’s “Red Flag Law,” protected safety in public spaces, and increased violence prevention programming. The Gun Owners Action League collected signatures to try to repeal it. With ballot questions, always remember to pay attention what the yes means and what the no means: it’s yes to keep the law and no to repeal it.
The Legislature can take action until June 30 (the date signatures are due to the Secretary of the State) on any of the 10 other questions. With a question like Election Day Registration, which the State Senate has passed multiple times over the years, doing so seems like a no-brainer.
But barring a quicker legislature or a lot of illegible signatures, we are destined to a historically long ballot this November. Make sure to do your homework before heading into the polls: you won’t want to be taken by surprise by a never-ending list of questions when there is already a long list of offices on the ballot.
