Hidden Link

September 23, 2024

By Jennifer Smith

Voters in November will face five very different policy questions at the ballot box, ranging from changing testing standards, to unionizing ride-share drivers, to legalizing psychedelics. Millions of dollars are pouring in, ads are fluttering across airwaves and cyberspace, and, as in each ballot campaign cycle, the question arises: Is this really the best way to make law?

Ballot campaign experts weighed in on a live episode of The Codcast and The Horse Race podcasts last week, considering the current slate of measures and the feel of ballot campaigns over the decades. 

The strongest polling so far of the five measures is a direct jab at a Legislature perceived as opaque and glacial in its lawmaking processes – coming from a former lawmaker who is now the state auditor. Diana DiZoglio wants to pry open lawmakers’ processes for public scrutiny through a ballot question that would give her office authority to audit the Legislature.

"The auditor's question is lightning in a bottle,” said Steve Crawford, principal at Crawford Strategies. “I mean, I've never seen an opponent say two, three months before the election, ‘We're not even gonna spend money on it.’”

It’s a somewhat meta ballot measure, as the initiative process itself is increasingly seen as a way to push lawmakers into motion, even if elected representatives can get the final word in by dragging their feet or reaching deals to change ballot measures once passed by voters.

“Going to the ballot shows that that [legislative] process doesn't necessarily work the way it's intended,” Crawford said. “So people get an opportunity to take it to the voters themselves. I think it's a great thing. I really do.”

It’s also, as the panelists explored, more complicated than a straightforward expression of direct democracy. And in a state with few competitive elections, the ballot business has boomed.

“These are small businesses, very often, that we're creating to solve problems that sometimes people didn't even know they had,” said Lynda Tocci, a principal in the Dewey Square Group’s Boston office. “Like, who knew we needed medicinal marijuana at the time? Some patients thought it was important. And then we had to talk to a bunch of people – 2.8 or 3.2 million voters – about why it's important. And I think, over time, these ballot questions became, not an afterthought, but a full campaign of engagement with elected officials, community groups, community leaders, and the grassroots.”

Campaigning changed during the pandemic, panelists said, with some benefits like organizing through Zoom in addition to normal stand-outs and door knocking out in the physical world.

But Conor Yunits, executive vice president at Issues Management Group, said the media environment has also changed, impacting ballot campaign options for reaching potential voters. 

“I can't tell you how many fewer outlets are doing editorial board meetings or taking op-eds,” said Yunits, who is working on the Yes on Question 4 campaign to allow some use of psychedelics. “I lost count of how many board meetings we did in 2018. We have two scheduled right now for this election cycle. We've been calling newspapers, and they're all saying, ‘eh, we'll let you know if we decide to do one,’ or ‘no, we're not doing them anymore.’”

Still, voters are more engaged with ballot measures than ever, he said, pointing to the first half century of initiatives where about a third of the questions would be blanked by voters. Now, Yunits noted, the blank rate is under 5 percent. 

“So people are voting on the ballot questions at a much higher rate than they used to,” he said, “but that's just because they're just not leaving blanks. They’re not necessarily making informed decisions, maybe because of the “red book,” which interestingly enough also came to be because of a ballot question.”  

The “red book” in question is the state voter guide put out by Secretary of State Bill Galvin’s office, which includes pro and con arguments for each measure. Those arguments are often a point of contention for ballot campaigns, who say they can actually be misleading.

Since the state’s first ballot measures in 1919, Massachusetts voters have thrice been presented with a record nine questions to run through during their spin in the voting booth. And all of the questions can be consequential – the last year with nine questions was 1994, with the final ballot measure banning rent control in the state, an issue still sparking fights across the Commonwealth. 

The five before voters this fall are the most questions in two decades. Panelists acknowledged that presenting voters with that many possible initiatives can have mixed effects.

“In terms of asking people to decide a lot, one thing we see is that, as with candidates, people often start to default to partisan cues,” said Steve Koczela, president of the MassINC Polling Group. “And then you can see, oftentimes, which side's going to win if it becomes a partisan issue. Usually the Democratic side wins in Massachusetts.”

Even when issues don’t start out as partisan-coded, Koczela noted, they can develop into inter-party fights. He pointed to the 2016 fight over authorizing additional charter schools, which saw partisan divergence in the polling as the year went on and ultimately failed to pass.

That ballot questions can offer a mind-bending array of what yes or no votes could mean – voting yes to repeal a law, or create one, or remove an existing policy; voting no to keep a law, reject a repeal, or maintain the status quo – can create confusion among voters with limited time or interest in studying for the test. 

Voting records show that there is not much dropoff in votes between ballot question one and nine, with people deciding to stop voting partially through long ballots, Koczela said. Yet, it can be hard to move people to vote for change if they don’t understand a question. When in doubt, the panelists said, “no” tends to win the day.

“That's one we saw in the rank choice voting question, for instance,” Koczela said of the rejected 2020 ballot measure that would have changed the way elections count votes for candidates, “where very late in the game, we asked basically ‘would rank choice voting do these things and have these benefits?’ And lots of people said, 'I don't know.’ And it wasn't that they were necessarily against it, they just didn't know why to be for it.”