High stakes, big money: What to know about the 2026 ballot question fights in Mass. | John L. Micek

This week, Massachusetts voters got a clearer idea of the blizzard of ballot questions they could be asked to decide at the polls in 2026.

Questions dealing with rent control, reducing the state’s income tax, and same-day voter registration are likely to be among those on offer as reformers race to clear key hurdles to get their causes before the voters.

And while there’s still some distance to go before Election Day, at least two things are clear.

First, the biannual ballot question derby is increasingly seen as a vehicle for advocates and citizens alike to do an end-run on Beacon Hill, where the legislative process has slowed to a crawl.

“I think it’s already happening,” Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin, the state’s chief elections officer, told MassLive in a phone interview this week. “Increasingly, people are using this as a more effective way of getting around the Legislature.”

With the sheer volume of questions, spanning the ideological divide, Massachusetts voters could be in for a “watershed” year at the polls in 2026, Galvin said.

And second, that if the past is precedent (and it nearly always is), those same special interests will dump tons of money into those ballot fights as they try to win the day.

Advocates and other ballot petition groups cleared a key hurdle on Wednesday to submit their signatures. They now have until Dec. 3 to submit their signatures to Galvin’s office.

The Boston Democrat will then review them and hand them over to the Legislature, which has until May to vote them into law, amend them, or take no action at all.

If lawmakers punt and take no action, campaigners will have to gather 12,249 more signatures, submit them to local officials by June 2026, and then to state officials by July of that year, to get onto the November ballot.

One such group, the Massachusetts Opportunity Alliance, said it gathered more than enough signatures for a question trimming the state’s income tax to advance to the next round of consideration.

“The state’s tax-and-spend philosophy continues to make it harder for people and businesses to thrive in Massachusetts,” Christopher R. Anderson, president of the Massachusetts High Technology Council and a co-organizer of MOA, said in a statement.

“The MOA-inspired ballot proposals offer a much-needed course correction for the Commonwealth: Ultimately, these ideas would help rein in out-of-control state spending and put more money back in the pockets of taxpayers,” Anderson said.

Scotia Hille, the executive director of the advocacy group Act On Mass, said the depth and breadth of questions that could be put before the voters is reflective of a deep public dissatisfaction with Beacon Hill.

Lawmakers have passed just 66 new laws in the current two-year session that started Jan. 1, according to a WBUR-FM analysis. The majority, however, affect just one person or are local measures, the station reported.

Hille sees the volume of ballot questions as a symptom of a larger problem.

“To see … the failure of representative democracy in Massachusetts, and having to resort to, at such a large degree, popular democracy, I think it absolutely has consequences for how we’re able to make policy in the state,” Hille said.

The most remarkable example, she added, is Galvin himself, who’s been a Beacon Hill insider “for … longer than I’ve been alive for sure … [he] saw no path in the Legislature to even get a vote on same-day voter registration … that, you know, most other states in New England have,” Hille said.

The money question

Last year, forces on both sides of an ultimately successful fight to scrap the MCAS examination as a high school graduation requirement raised and spent a collective $6.2 million, state campaign finance records show.

Millions more in what are known as “in-kind” donations, in which a good or service, but not cash, changes hands, also flowed into that ballot fight, records showed.

Meanwhile, forces supporting a ballot question allowing ride-share drivers to unionize raised and spent nearly $7.3 million on their way to victory at the ballot box, state filings showed.

Paul Craney, the executive director of the pro-business Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, agreed that it’s a sure bet that the ballot fights will be flooded with cash.

“Money is speech that is established,” Craney said. “So more money means just more speech.”

One thing to watch: Money coming into these state-level contests from out-of-state interests, Hille said.

“And I think that’s a shame because people won’t always know … who’s funding the ballot question, or funding the ads that they’re seeing on TV.”

Because the proposed laws and constitutional amendments have the potential to reshape state policy for decades to come, there’s often sharp-elbowed sparring on the way to Election Day.

This week, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, for instance, strongly signaled that she had reservations about the rent control question, which would limit rent increases on most apartments to 5% or less.

“I wish that the ballot initiative had been just a pure local option, repeal the ban on cities taking action and let each city do what they need to do,” Wu told WGBH-FM’s Boston Public Radio program.

But there’s no guarantee that one side will carry the day simply because they have deeper pockets, the Fiscal Alliance’s Craney offered.

“Ultimately, it’s the voters who get to decide these things, if it’s a good idea or not,” he said. “And Massachusetts voters, for the most part, make good decisions on these potential ballot questions when they’re before them.”