LEGISLATIVE LEADERS are leaving the door open to reworking some of the ballot questions should voters approve them in November.
Two ballot questions in particular have drawn Beacon Hill’s scorn: Question 1 would explicitly authorize the state auditor to audit the state Legislature, while Question 2 would remove passing the MCAS test as a high school graduation requirement.
If top lawmakers rewrite, or repeal, the ballot questions after they become law, it wouldn’t be the first time. In 1998, voters approved the Clean Elections law by a 2-to-1 margin, endorsing a measure that set up public financing for candidates. After tangling with the state’s highest court over funding or repealing it, lawmakers chose the latter in 2003.
More recently, lawmakers rewrote the marijuana legalization law after voters approved it in 2016, turning cannabis into something that’s regulated like gambling instead of liquor.
Asked on Tuesday if he would seek to repeal or amend Question 1, House Speaker Ron Mariano said, “Being no fan of making laws by ballot initiative, after seeing how screwed up the marijuana thing got, I haven’t made up my mind yet. We’ll see. We’ll see how big the margin is.”
Public polls have shown the question winning handily, with bipartisan support, and both progressives and conservatives backing the measure. Auditor Diana DiZoglio, a Democrat who is campaigning for Question 1, released an audit on Monday that mainly highlighted legislative leaders refusing to cooperate with her quest.
“Releasing a report, using state money, state resources, advocating for your position on a ballot question that you helped put in, raises some real questions about the role of the auditor and her seriousness,” Mariano told reporters.
Senate President Karen Spilka, in a separate scrum with reporters, also didn’t rule out addressing voter-approved laws after the election., “We’ll see what course it takes but right now we are focused on getting our bills done, the work of the people done.” she said.
Mariano, a former schoolteacher, also opposes the MCAS question, which is primarily funded by the Massachusetts Teachers Association. The “no” side, backed by business groups, is getting outspent, but recently pulled in $250,000 from Jim Davis, the chairman of shoemaker New Balance, and $100,000 from State Street, the financial services firm.
“Someone has to evaluate what we’re doing in our public school system,” Mariano said. “I mean, we go from one of the great success stories in the country, where reading levels shot way up, to now being lower or middle. So something happened. And now to walk away from any evaluation tool is maybe premature. I think there’s a lot of questions that have to be answered.”
The teachers union, led by Max Page, “has to start to think about what they’re going to propose as a solution,” Mariano added. “Because right now they’re sort of adrift.”
The question, if it passes, would allow individual school districts to come up with their own standards.
“We’ll have some discussions if it passes and then we’ll follow up,” Spilka said. “I am not in favor of getting rid of MCAS. I believe that it’s done – some assessment has done Massachusetts well, so we will discuss.”
Page, the union leader, hit back at Spilka and Mariano through a statement calling them the “lonely few opponents from Beacon Hill” with a “weird obsession” with standardized testing. The union has previously pressed to eliminate the requirement, and the ballot question is now seeing a “groundswell of support” arrive for the “Yes on 2” side.
“The State House is not Ron Mariano’s house or Karen Spilka’s house — the speaker and senate president should refrain from crossing the will of the people,” Page said in the statement.
Early voting is already underway, with a total of five questions on the ballot: Question 3 would allow Uber and Lyft workers to unionize, Question 4 would legalize psychedelics and Question 5 would give a minimum wage to tipped workers.
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