In July 2025, Framingham Democratic activists were celebrating their annual barbecue when 80-year-old Norma Shulman posed a question to Secretary of State Bill Galvin about a proposal to allow new voters to register on the same day they cast a ballot. State law currently bars anyone from newly registering or changing their address within 10 days of an election, leading reform proponents to argue that thousands of Bay Staters are disenfranchised each year. Eliminating the blackout period has had major pockets of support on Beacon Hill for almost two decades, with the Senate approving some version of Election Day registration on three different occasions since 2008. However, each instance faced resistance in the House and failed to pass.
Galvin, as Shulman recalls, made “a few little comments” about the repeatedly stalled effort and said he’d get back to her. A couple of weeks later, her phone rang. It was the secretary, and he had a new idea. “He said, ‘It’s just never going to get passed by the House. I’m doing something about it,'” Shulman recounted. Within days, the longest-serving secretary of state in Massachusetts history was standing in Shulman’s dining room, joined by some of her friends in Framingham, signing the paperwork to launch a campaign that would go directly to voters and ask them to write Election Day registration directly into state law.
Fast forward to today, and Shulman is chairing the main committee in support of the measure, circumventing a Legislature where the idea has long failed to earn the required support from all stakeholders. The question is one of nine on the ballot, tying the record for the most in a single year since Massachusetts wrote the option of direct democracy into its constitution 108 years ago. It’s been more than three decades since voters last had this many significant decisions to make about state law.
Across Massachusetts, while voters weigh reshaping how primary elections work and parse the particulars of the state tax cap formula, they find themselves asking another question: Why is all of this falling to us in the first place? The surge in questions on the November ballot and the tens of millions of dollars being spent on them has revived debate about the process itself. Are initiative petitions a legitimate policymaking tool that citizens can wield when their elected officials are too resistant to public opinion? Or are they an outdated, poorly designed mechanism that can be exploited, especially in a post-Citizens United world, by those with a specific vision and money to burn?
Indeed, ballot questions have become the primary source of political kindling in a season when few races for elected office in Massachusetts are generating much heat of their own. Most of the people pushing the measures are not shy about bashing the Legislature, claiming they were forced into action because do-nothing politicians refuse to touch a widely popular idea. “It’s 1,000 percent the fault of the Legislature for not solving problems,” said Jim Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute, which is backing a question that would overhaul the state’s tax cap and rebate law.
Legislators have responded with defensiveness and disdain, worried that a surge in spending and a fragmented media environment opened the door for financed entities with little regard for nuance to coopt a democratic option. House Speaker Ron Mariano, who has spent more than a year grumbling about both the number and types of decisions now handed to voters, said in a statement for this story that the initiative petition process is “fundamentally broken,” taken advantage of by “special interest groups and overly-ambitious politicians who r
