South Shore News | Ballot Question Series, Week 1 of 9
This is the first in a nine part series looking at each of the ballot questions coming to Massachusetts voters in November.
Please take the poll in the middle of the article.
Consider a resident who walks into a town hall anywhere between Weymouth and Plymouth and asks for a copy of a contract the select board signed.
A clock starts. The town has ten business days to hand the record over or explain in writing why not. Copies cost five cents a page, nothing at all by email. If the town says no, the resident can appeal to the Supervisor of Public Records, who has ten business days to rule. If it goes to court and the resident wins, the town is presumed to owe the legal fees.
None of that applies to the people who wrote those rules.
On Nov. 3, voters will decide Question 1, which would put the Massachusetts Legislature and the governor’s office under the same public records law that every city, town, school district and state agency already follows. It is the most popular of the nine statewide questions on this year’s ballot: a UMass Amherst/WCVB poll conducted Aug. 5–12 found 84 percent of registered voters in favor and 7 percent opposed.
It also has a local dimension that most coverage of this question will not mention. The Legislature has spent the summer passing its own, narrower alternative — and the author of the House version, Speaker Ronald Mariano, represents five precincts of Weymouth.
What the question would actually do
Question 1 makes two changes.
The first is additive: it writes the Legislature and the governor’s office into the list of entities whose records are public. The second is a repeal. A separate statute, Chapter 66 Section 18, currently states that the public records law “shall not apply to the records of the general court.” Question 1 strikes that language. Both changes take effect Jan. 1, 2027.
It does not build a new system. Legislative and gubernatorial records would become presumptively public under the same exemptions that already protect personnel files, ongoing investigations, trade secrets and personal privacy everywhere else in state and municipal government.
The petition adds two exemptions of its own. Communications between a legislator and a constituent seeking help obtaining a government benefit or service would stay private. So would documents relating to the development of policy positions — by legislators or by the governor — a carve-out that some transparency advocates consider broad and supporters consider necessary.
Question 1 does not reach the judiciary, which remains exempt either way.
One point of possible confusion worth clearing up: this is not the 2024 ballot question. Two years ago, voters passed a different Question 1 authorizing the state auditor to audit the Legislature. That measure is why this one exists, but the two work through entirely different mechanisms — and as the next section explains, the first one has still not fully taken effect.
The law your town already lives with
The contrast is the point of the question, so it is worth being specific.
A Massachusetts municipality must designate a Records Access Officer and post that person’s contact information in town buildings and online. The officer has ten business days to comply with a written request or explain in writing why not, with a good-faith cost estimate. Municipalities may take up to twenty-five business days to produce records, and can seek a further thirty-business-day extension from the Supervisor of Public Records for good cause.
Black-and-white copies are capped at five cents a page. Electronic records are free. Employee time is billed at no more than the hourly rate of the lowest-paid employee capable of doing the work, and never above $25 an hour without the Supervisor’s approval — with the first two hours free in municipalities over 20,000 residents. A requester who is denied can appeal to the Supervisor of Public Records, an office within the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s department, within ninety days, or go straight to Superior Court. A requester who prevails is presumed to be owed attorney’s fees, and a town found to have withheld records in bad faith can be assessed punitive damages of $1,000 to $5,000.
Every one of those obligations was written by the Legislature. None of them applies to the Legislature.
How the exemption happened
Not by design, exactly. By accumulation.
The modern public records law dates to 1973, when the Legislature established a presumption of openness for records held by any “agency, executive office, department, board, commission, bureau, division or authority of the commonwealth.” That list does not mention the Legislature, the governor or the courts.
Three Supreme Judicial Court decisions then took the list at its word. In 1977, in a case brought by Ottaway Newspapers, the court held that records properly part of court files fall outside the public records statute. In 1978, reporters for Westinghouse Broadcasting sought the Legislature’s itemized long-distance telephone bills — an expense record of exactly the kind any town clerk must produce — and the SJC pointed both to the missing enumeration and to Chapter 66 Section 18.
The governor’s exemption arrived last and rests on the thinnest foundation. In 1997, in Lambert v. Executive Director of the Judicial Nominating Council, a requester sought a judicial applicant’s completed questionnaire. The SJC observed that “the Governor also is not explicitly included” in the 1973 list. There is no statute exempting the governor’s office. Every gubernatorial denial since has traced back to that sentence.
The Legislature came close to changing this once. During debate on the 2016 reform bill — the overhaul that produced the ten-day deadlines and nickel-a-page caps municipalities live under today — Rep. Jim Lyons pushed to strip the legislative exemption. House Democrats blocked the proposal on a 122-to-34 procedural vote in November 2015. In its place, the final law created a special commission to study extending coverage to all three branches. The commission missed its December 2018 deadline and never reconvened. Its House chair, Rep. Jennifer Benson, wrote that “the Commission was unable to reach a consensus on the contents of a final report by the December 1, 2018 deadline.”
Why it is on the ballot now
Because voters already ordered something similar, and it did not happen.
In November 2024, Massachusetts voters passed a ballot question authorizing State Auditor Diana DiZoglio to audit the Legislature. It carried 2,326,932 votes to 924,294 — 71.6 percent. No committee ever registered to oppose it.
Legislative leaders rejected the result almost immediately, arguing that an executive-branch officer auditing the legislative branch violates the separation of powers. When DiZoglio requested four categories of records in January 2025 — chamber budgets, chamber financial audits, certain line-item transactions, and employee settlement agreements — both chambers refused.
Sixteen months passed before anything moved. Attorney General Andrea Campbell, who had determined in 2023 that DiZoglio lacked authority to conduct the audit without consent, declined to authorize a lawsuit. DiZoglio sued anyway in February 2026, naming Speaker Mariano, Senate President Karen Spilka and both chamber clerks. Campbell moved to strike the suit, telling the court that “by statute, the Attorney General is a gatekeeper empowered to determine when, if ever” such disputes reach a courtroom.
At argument in May, Justice Scott Kafker told both officials: “Ultimately, you two don’t get to decide to leave it in limbo indefinitely, because the people have an interest in having that resolved.” The court gave Campbell thirty days to decide. She relented within a week and allowed DiZoglio to hire her own counsel.
Then, on May 28, the Senate voted 33 to 6 to hand over the four document sets — while adopting language stating it does not concede the audit’s constitutionality. “This isn’t capitulation at all,” Sen. Paul Feeney said. “This is a balanced, responsible way for us to respond.” Mariano said the House would not follow, and it has not.
The Supreme Judicial Court has still never ruled on whether the Legislature must submit to the audit at all.
DiZoglio, who put $150,000 from her campaign account into the signature drive for Question 1, argues audit authority was never sufficient on its own. An audit must follow professional standards and relate to a specific engagement. A public records request can be filed by anyone, for any reason, at any time.
What the SJC has already said about Question 1
In April, before any of the summer’s legislating, the Supreme Judicial Court issued an advisory opinion to the Senate on the ballot petition itself.
The court declined to knock the question off the ballot. It held that the measure does not merely regulate the Legislature’s “internal proceedings or operations” but creates “a new right of access” — the standard the challenge had turned on.
But the opinion also flagged questions it did not answer: how the measure would interact with each chamber’s power to write its own rules, where it sits against the separation of powers, and how it squares with the constitutional privilege protecting legislative speech and debate. Those, the court noted, it “will likely have to resolve if the public records ballot question becomes law.”
In other words, a yes vote in November would not be the end of the argument. It would move it to a different courtroom.
