Ballot Question Explainer

Understanding the 2026 state ballot questions in Massachusetts

Introduction

  • Our goal in putting out this explainer is not mainly to convince you to vote one way or another. In fact, this explainer is not targeted only at voters. We want all working-class people to understand what a circus so much of this is and also where our real power lies.

    You’ll notice not all nine of this year’s ballot questions are here. Again, we don’t aim to offer a comprehensive set of voting instructions to guide you through voting for each question. This is not a voter guide. Instead, we hope this explainer will illuminate causes, solutions, and forces at play, and we see the ballot questions that we’ve selected as being well-suited to that purpose.

    That doesn’t mean there aren’t questions where we have a clear stance — for example, on Question 2 to extend union rights to public defenders, we support worker organizing, regardless of any law. Our support, however, does not extend to police, an arm of the state that represses workers, and we challenge the legitimacy of the capitalist criminal-legal system.

    Our socialist perspective, on these questions and so much more, is distinct from that of liberals, and we want to expose misdirection and deception by capitalist parties and the ways that laws and the state serve particular economic interests. With this explainer, we seek to go beyond the narrow framing of these questions and raise far bigger ones about our capitalist society. Join us!

  • We’re socialists, and our aim is socialism, which means, in the plainest terms, a seizure of political power by the working class, a democratic socialization of ownership of our economy, and an economic system in which our labor power is no longer a commodity.

    As said in our Principles for Socialist Electoral Work, we see U.S. elections, and those in any capitalist democracy, as largely a sham. They mislead people into thinking our hand is on the wheel when really they decide which faction of the ruling class will take it for the next few years.

    Even without the Electoral College, Senate, gerrymandering, and judicial review, the system is thoroughly undemocratic. The equality of participants is superficial and purely legal because the intense concentration of wealth and economic power inherent to capitalism inevitably translates into a tremendous concentration and inequality of political power, incompatible with democracy.

    And we refer not only to campaign spending, lobbying, and the media, but to private ownership of the means of production by the capitalist class and their devastating power — no matter who is elected — to withdraw investment as they please, throttling the economy and all of us with it.

    So, we’re clear-eyed about the nature of elections, and yet, still we participate. Socialists must champion struggles for reforms, not because reforms offer a way out of capitalism — they don’t — but to raise class consciousness and build a socialist party, which do. Electoral work offers opportunities not for fleeting policy or election wins but subordinate to higher, political aims: reaching and organizing the masses, dispelling illusions, and broadcasting our socialist politics.

  • Ballot questions in Massachusetts can seek to pass or repeal a law and are also required for constitutional amendments. Interest groups use them when they want to change the state constitution or cannot get the state legislature to fund, act on, or stay away from their priorities.

    For example, Question 6 seeks to reserve some existing sales tax revenue for conservation and is driven by conservation groups that want to force the legislature to redirect state funding to their priority. Question 8 was initiated by a Virginia-based anti-marijuana group now spending millions to try to end Massachusetts’s multibillion-dollar recreational marijuana industry. Similarly, Question 9 is driven by gun owners wanting to roll back state regulations on gun ownership to what they were before October 2024, when the governor signed a new gun law.

    Because state laws typically require tens of thousands of signatures to put questions on the statewide ballot and because these campaigns can sometimes necessitate millions in spending to win, statewide ballot question campaigns typically need to be well-funded. Naturally, that means many ballot questions end up being initiated by capital against the interests of labor.

    It should be noted too that the state legislature can stop constitutional amendments from even making it to the ballot and has the power to change or undo laws passed by ballot question. Likewise, the courts can throw out questions as well.

    You might know, for example, that the state legislature has battled against implementing a ballot question passed in 2024 authorizing the state auditor to audit the legislature, and that the state supreme court stopped rent control from appearing on your ballot this year. They have constitutional objections — our critiques are on the actual merits — but our stance is not one of demanding binding legislation by ballot question. That’s because the root cause of this crisis of democracy is the structure of the legislature itself and the classes that it represents.

    In a socialist world, with the working class exercising truly democratic control in their workplaces and over all of society, we could have a proportionally elected body recallable by workers, and ballot questions to circumvent a legislature wouldn’t be necessary at all. In fact, the supremacy of a legislature could be an asset to and an instrument of a working class that wielded it.

    But in the meantime, we know that power is not expressed by passing ballot questions. No, the power of our class comes from its indispensable role in production. “Without our brain and muscle” — without our labor — “not a single wheel can turn.” There are many things the state legislature will never willingly allow, but organized mass action can compel it. If the choice is between radical changes and the economy grinding to a halt, radical changes will indeed come.

    A major task for the socialist movement is to build up to that moment and then to go further still and dispense with the capitalist state and its state legislatures altogether, instituting a workers republic and putting the working class in charge of its destiny. In Central Mass & Worcester DSA, all of our efforts in the electoral arena are toward this end and for that day.

Question 1: Public Records

Will access to the governor’s call logs make state government work for you?

  • There’s a general feeling that the state is going in the wrong direction and that people’s lives are getting worse, coupled with a sense that self-serving politicians aren’t doing anything about it.

  • The Yes on 1 campaign presumes vaguely-defined “corruption” in state government is stopping the vaguely-defined “people’s business” from being done. The campaign argues that expanding public records requests will have a transformative effect on this state of affairs.

    Question 1 proposes to expand the public records law to the legislature and governor’s office. Specifically, it allows requests for administrative and financial records like vendor contracts, employee settlement agreements, and lawmakers’ schedules but exempts correspondence about active policy development and most communications with constituents and lobbyists.

  • Even if the legislature does not further narrow or undo Question 1, which is likely, we know requests already allowed by the public records law can face long waits, fees, and refusals. The question neither fundamentally changes how the state government works nor who it works for.

  • Yes on 1 is backed by:

    • state Auditor Diana DiZoglio (D), who has made attacking the legislature as corrupt a centerpiece of her populist campaign persona and future political prospects;

    • liberals like Harvard Professor Danielle Allen, who since her failed Democratic candidacy for governor has pushed a variety of liberal good governance reforms;

    • left liberal groups like Act on Mass, Progressive Mass, and Our Revolution, who believe scrutiny will disempower moneyed interests and help make government work for us;

    • Berkshires DSA, Boston DSA, and River Valley DSA, who say it will expose private dealings and increase democratic accountability for the “unproductive” state legislature;

    • the MA Republican Party and MassFiscal, which see a chance to attack Democrats and ride some Republicans’ belief that this will upend Democrats’ electoral dominance; and

    • other supporters, including Gov. Maura Healey (D), who is up for re-election and can’t afford to hand an easy attack line to the billionaire running against her.

    Some of the Yes on 1 campaign’s largest donors include DiZoglio’s campaign, Allen’s Partners in Democracy nonprofit, and public sector unions representing educators (the MTA) and other government workers (NAGE) affected by the legislature’s budget. Other notable donors include failed Republican candidate for governor Mike Kennealy, the charter school-obsessed and free-market fundamentalist Pioneer Institute, and Teamsters Locals 25 and 170.

  • The No side is backed by state Senate and House leadership. They claim it's an inter-branch separation of powers issue because the secretary of state manages public records law. In reality, they oppose any measure that may inconvenience them, as info from requests might. There’s currently no organized committee spending money to defeat Question 1, however.

  • The Massachusetts legislature is unaccountable. Some bills are quietly killed in committee, some are changed on short notice before passage, other bills combine must-pass funding for public services with giveaways for the rich, voice votes hide where lawmakers stand, and unelected six-member conference committees legislate for 200 legislators — and the Senate President and House Speaker in particular — in a pointlessly bicameral legislature.

    Yet if residents want to know who state government works for, many records, like the state budget, lobbyist registration, campaign finance reports, some votes, even Gov. Healey’s own words are already public and tell us a lot. Although we don’t oppose it, we don’t also need to add access to the governor’s call logs or to see lawmakers’ calendars to solve the puzzle. And there’s no realistic expectation anything will meaningfully change from passing Question 1. More transparency cannot and will not stop the state from working for who it does: the capitalist class.

    No amount of government transparency can force the capitalist state into becoming a workers state, and if any rules on transparency ever truly came to prevent the capitalist state from smoothly facilitating profit-making and labor exploitation, they would be readily cast aside.

    The “good governance,” “efficiency,” or “people’s business” that is to come from transparency is an empty demand with no inherent political character. It’s raised by populist hucksters out to build political careers by hawking anti-politics in place of offering anything of substance to the working class. And because calls for transparency are largely devoid of politics, each supporter can project their own desired outcomes onto it — a transparent government will finally make it easier or harder to vote, protect immigrants or punish them, and tax the rich or unshackle them.

    For this to work, you have to believe that the problem is a few bad apples and that with transparency, we can weed them out. But holding each fruit up to the light means little if we then without question deposit them into a perpetually moldy barrel and insist against all evidence of our eyes and noses that something doesn’t look and smell rotten.

    Of course, our aim as socialists is not to restore faith in the capitalist state but to challenge and destroy it. We’re out to overturn the barrel. Put another way, rather than the liberal belief that the system is broken and you can fix it (by voting Yes on 1), we know that the system is fixed and we can break it (by building a workers movement and socialist party that can win socialism).

Question 3: All-Party Primaries

Is private equity spending millions to make elections more democratic?

  • There’s a sense that government in this state isn’t responsive because most county, state, and federal elected officials cruise to re-election without serious (or any) competition.

  • The Yes on 3 campaign assumes competitive general elections are good and parties are bad. The campaign argues that eliminating parties’ role in candidate selection and making more general election contests competitive, without changing anything else, will make government more responsive.

    Question 3 proposes to limit general elections to two candidates and change their selection. Specifically, it would end separate party primaries, putting Democrats, Republicans, third-party candidates, and independents in a single primary, with only the top two allowed in the general election. Primary ballots would show candidates’ party registration and party endorsements.

  • Question 3 won’t really raise turnout but may raise donors’ power by forcing two competitive (expensive) rounds of campaigning. The question may also boost Republican voters’ influence but mostly locks Republican and third-party candidates out of general elections in the state. To avoid the same fate, it incentivizes strategic voting and consolidation by same-party candidates.

  • Yes on 3 is backed by:

    • former Congressman Joe Kennedy III (D), Congressmen Seth Moulton (D) and Jake Auchincloss (D), and former Govs. Charlie Baker (R) and Deval Patrick (D) — so-called “centrist” politicians whose hopes of higher office have been impeded by primary voters;

    • the Boston Globe, which has a similar political lean;

    • Steve Grossman (D), former AIPAC president and past Mass Dems and DNC chair;

    • state Sen. John Velis (D), who attacked DSA’s national program as “certifiably insane;”

    • private equity and venture capital, which hope this produces favorable policies;

    • groups hoping this change will help defeat candidates who campaign on “fighting property developers and the billionaire class;”

    • small liberal groups like the Democrats of Clark University, Holden Democratic Town Committee, and Indivisible in Worcester, Fitchburg, Barre, and the Brookfields; and

    • others who automatically support any change to the current electoral system.

    You won’t have heard the names of the Yes on 3 campaign’s largest donors, but they’re almost all executives or partners at private equity and venture capital firms like Bain and Berkshire Partners. Notably, many Yes on 3 donors were also behind the No campaign against the 2022 millionaires tax question and the Yes campaign for the 2016 charter school expansion question.

  • The No side is not well-funded but is backed by:

    • unions like SEIU, AFT, MTA, and UAW Region 9A, who understand it would increase the influence of capital in state politics at the expense of labor;

    • left liberal groups like Progressive Mass, Act on Mass, and Our Revolution, along with Sen. Ed Markey and Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, who understand it would advantage their well-funded, more business-friendly opponents;

    • the MA Democratic Party, which generally protects incumbents;

    • the MA Republican Party, which does not want to be locked out of general elections; and

    • Berkshires DSA, Boston DSA, and River Valley DSA, who say it empowers billionaires at the expense of left liberal and socialist candidates.

  • While we support certain changes to the electoral system and structure of government, we carefully evaluate their impact on the working class’s ability to contest the political arena.

    For example, Question 4 would allow eligible residents to newly register to vote and to update their voter registration address on Election Day, a small change benefiting working-class renters who move frequently and may miss the current requirement to register 10 days before Election Day. Question 3, meanwhile, could result in the electoral defeat of some Democratic incumbents, sure, but it’d likely replace them with candidates who have similar or worse politics.

    Naturally, it’s helpful to check who supports an electoral change to understand who will benefit. With Question 3, it’s very easy to look at the donors and ask: Are multi-millionaires cutting six-figure checks to Yes on 3 because they love democracy? And the answer is no — they hope all-party primaries in this state will elect more Democrats who support cutting their taxes.

    In contrast to Question 3, socialists generally support strong, member-led and accountable parties, which allow party members to democratically set their political program and decide their own membership, leadership, and candidates without interference from the capitalist state. The program of Central Mass & Worcester DSA further calls for a system of legislative supremacy, where the people’s representatives direct the state and are proportionally elected, recallable at all times, and make no more than the median worker.

    Question 3 does nothing to change the factors that actually make government unrepresentative of and unresponsive to the vast majority: state control of party affiliation and state-administered primaries to select candidates, single-winner districts that award 100% of representation to a single voting bloc, unelected courts acting as superlegislatures, campaign contributions and lobbying, and, of course, private ownership of the economy by a tiny minority.

    We enter the existing electoral arena ourselves as socialists in part to reach those members of our class who still hold faith in reforming elections and government without touching capitalism. At the same time, we recognize that real economic inequality under capitalism will always trump any formal political equality. It’s with that knowledge that we organize for socialism, which is the only means by which true democracy can and ever will be realized.

Question 5: State Tax Revenue Cap

Do the richest people in the state really care about your cost of living?

  • Wages haven’t kept up with the rising cost of basic necessities like food, housing, and utilities. This is squeezing working-class people’s pockets and is driving more people out of the state.

  • The Yes on 5 campaign assumes that the state’s high cost of living is primarily driven by high taxes to fund wasteful government spending. The campaign argues that a stricter cap on state revenue will make Massachusetts affordable through frequent state tax refunds.

    Question 5 proposes to change a rule set by a 40-year-old ballot question that restricts annual state tax revenue to how much was collected in 1986, adjusted for wage growth, and that requires refunds of any extra. Specifically, it disconnects the revenue cap from 1986 revenue to instead fluctuate annually based on each previous year’s state tax collections plus wage growth.

  • While we don’t question that wasteful state spending exists — one need only review the arsenal and salary list of every police department — that is not what this question is about. Question 5 will trigger more tax refunds by lowering the revenue cap, which is rarely hit now that state taxes are generally a lower share of income. Wealthy areas might raise property taxes to maintain their services, but for many there will be periodic cuts to education, roads and transit, parks, social services, and healthcare — and especially lasting ones when recessions slash the cap. It may also mean higher state tuition and local fees and fines, which are not capped.

  • Yes on 5 is backed by:

    • a variety of front groups that push the interests of the biggest industries and wealthiest capitalists in the state, named below in the list of major and noteworthy donors; and

    • the MA Republican Party and MassFiscal, a closely aligned anti-tax business lobby.

    Some of the Yes on 5 campaign’s largest donors are the business groups Mass Opportunity Alliance and the Massachusetts High Technology Council. Other notable donors include the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, the Pioneer Institute, and Massachusetts Competitive Partnership, a mouthpiece for the state’s richest residents, including the richest Abigail Johnson, and at least three other billionaires — all of them surely concerned about the high cost of living.

  • The No side is backed by unions like SEIU, MTA, AFT, AFSCME, and the Laborers, who represent workers most directly affected by cuts to state funding, and Berkshires DSA, Boston DSA, and River Valley DSA, who say it will undermine or undo the Fair Share millionaires tax passed in 2022. Left liberals in Progressive Mass, which says millions in tax rebates will go to the rich, and aligned Democratic Party elected officials also support No.

  • Unless you rake in over a million dollars in income per year, Massachusetts residents have not seen an increase in the state’s individual income, general sales, or gas excise tax rates in over a decade. For this reason, it’s hard to believe that the rising cost of living is due to state taxes or that inflicting austerity on the working class to fund tax rebates will leave us much better off.

    Instead, working-class people have seen their paychecks fail to keep up with the prices they pay for things like housing, healthcare, groceries, and more. And who’s responsible for that? It’s many of the very same capitalists pouring money into this ballot question so they can force cuts to public funding for housing, healthcare, food security, and more.

    Of course, capitalists did not suddenly become greedy in the past few years. When working-class people feel it in their wallets, it’s not caused by sudden corporate greed any more than the good times are caused by great corporate generosity. No, over the past 50 years, the organized capitalist class has won major victories over an increasingly unorganized working class. This is the real cause of the cost of living crisis. A major employer counterattack starting in the 1970s weakened the labor movement, clearing the stage for neoliberalism to assault the New Deal welfare state — defunding and privatizing public services and slashing wages and benefits, allowing the capitalist class to run roughshod over workers.

    With membership now near rock bottom as a share of the overall workforce, unions haven’t won an increase in the federal minimum wage for nearly 20 years. Employers in turn innovate new ways to discipline gig workers by algorithm and pocket cost-savings from automation.

    Capitalists pitted this country’s workers against those in the underdeveloped world in a race to the bottom through off-shoring. But global supply chains also contributed to higher prices in recent years as they were disrupted by COVID-19, tariffs, and now imperialist war against Iran.

    The capitalist class’s tax scams offer no real solutions. Central Mass & Worcester DSA instead supports workers’ organization and struggle against employers. Our political program further demands a $30/hour minimum wage, a 24-hour workweek with no reduction in pay, a strong national pension for all workers, an expansive public jobs program, and a ban on union-busting. We also call to guarantee basic needs like food, healthcare, housing, and education. And we know the capitalist class and its parties oppose these aims, which won’t be won easily.

    Still, as socialists our goal is not simply redistribution through social programs funded by taxing the rich. Our movement is building toward the working class seizing the means of production, whose private ownership determines capitalism’s highly concentrated distribution of wealth. When the working class takes power and expropriates the capitalists, they will no longer demand ransom for basic needs or profit off the daily struggles of humanity. Democratic socialization of the economy will see workers control their own basic needs and their own lives.

    This will only be possible through mass organization of the working class and through struggle. That’s why we want you to get organized and join us in DSA, the country’s largest socialist org.

Question 7: Single-Family Zoning

Will building million-dollar homes in the Boston suburbs lower your rent?

  • In short, housing costs have gone up, workers’ wages have lagged, and so this basic necessity of life has become increasingly burdensome to afford for more of the working class.

  • The Yes on 7 campaign rests on the idea that family homeownership is an inherent good. The campaign argues that overriding zoning restrictions that block or inconvenience for-profit developers will result in more construction, more affordable homes, and more homeownership.

    Question 7 proposes to streamline the permitting process to automatically allow single-family homes on smaller lots than some towns’ existing minimum lot-size requirements. Specifically, it allows single-family homes on lots of at least 5,000 square feet with road access and existing water and sewer service in any “zoning district that allows residential uses.”

  • It’s estimated that Question 7 may generate only a few hundred new, likely million-dollar homes per year, mostly in the Boston suburbs. The question does not mandate building or affordability, and in reality, the state’s high land costs generally incentivize expensive home construction.

  • Yes on 7 is backed by:

    • those profiting off building, selling, or renting homes;

    • their pro-developer allies like Gov. Healey (D), the MA Democratic Party, the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce, and the Boston Globe;

    • pro-developer YIMBY (“yes, in my backyard”) groups like Abundant Housing MA and A Better Cambridge, who ideologically support writing developers a blank check; and

    • Berkshires DSA and Boston DSA, who say affordability and higher density will result from zoning for more single-family homes.

    Some of the Yes on 7 campaign’s largest donors include the Greater Boston Real Estate Board, Airbnb, and Massachusetts Association of Realtors. Other notable donors include Zillow, Apartment Income REIT LLC of Denver, Redgate Real Estate Advisors, and Andrew Mikula, who chairs the campaign’s ballot question committee and works at the Pioneer Institute.

  • The No side is generally backed by groups that support local control of land use decisions like the Massachusetts Municipal Association and anti-development NIMBY groups that seek to restrict the number of residents in their community or exclude lower-income homebuyers. There’s currently no organized committee spending money to defeat Question 7, however.

  • Setting the market free through zoning changes will not make housing meaningfully more affordable, whether it’s allowing single-family homes to add accessory dwelling units (ADUs) by right under the 2024 Affordable Homes Act or allowing more single-family homes under Question 7. And that’s because for-profit developers have no interest in permanently, deeply affordable housing for all, and any market-based approach is dependent on them for it.

    As long as housing is a commodity to be bought, sold, and rented out for the greatest profit, it will always be tenants who will have to pay the price. Only a small minority of tenants will ever be able to own their own home, but homeownership is dangled like a carrot on a stick as a disciplining measure to keep people prisoners of the “American Dream” instead of revolting against these unjust conditions. Housing should not be a commodity but rather a social good to which everyone has a right and that should be affordable for all.

    We want every resident of Massachusetts to have a universally guaranteed right to publicly-owned housing — in other words, the right to live without a landlord. What we need is not an enrichment plan for developers, but a system of social housing.

    Our vision is of collective homeownership through a statewide social housing authority, paid for by a tax on vacant properties and on wealth and inheritances over $5 million, to:

    • build and renovate (with union labor) high-quality, transit-connected housing options,

    • provide communal facilities like libraries, kindergartens, and green space,

    • cap costs at a permanently affordable 10% of tenants’ household income, and

    • place this housing under the democratic management of the tenants living there.

    And ultimately, the uncompensated expropriation of landlords and a prohibition on landlording.

    We know from the revolutionary workers of Vienna, who won social housing in the last century, that only class struggle by organized workers and tenants will win these concessions.

    And we’re going to the ballot in the 6th Worcester District with Question 10 to give the working class in the Southbridge area the chance to weigh in this November. We see this ballot question not as a magic switch that will deliver by itself the social housing we demand, but as an organizing tool and first step to building up the organization and massive pressure on the ruling class in our society that will be needed to win it.