Category: Ballot Questions

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ballot campaigns are racing into their final stretch of signature collection – some facing court challenges and all facing Legislative ambivalence.