[[{“value”:”

By: Central Mass & Worcester DSA

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!

How we think about elections

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.

What are these questions on my ballot?

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.

The Central Mass & Worcester DSA membership democratically approved this ballot question explainer in lieu of a traditional voter guide.

The post OPINION: Understanding 2026 State Ballot Questions in Massachusetts appeared first on Working Mass.

“}]]