South Shore News | Ballot Question Series, Week 3 of 9
This is the third 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.
Look down the November ballot past the ballot questions, into the county offices, and in several races you will find exactly one name.
In Plymouth County, Thomas O’Brien of Plymouth is the only candidate for county treasurer. Matthew McDonough of Marshfield is the only candidate for register of probate. In Norfolk County, the same is true of Peter Collins for county commissioner, Michael Bellotti for treasurer and Colleen Brierley for register of probate.
District Attorney Timothy Cruz, who has held that office since 2001, faces no Democratic opponent.
Then there is the race that did have a contest. Norfolk County’s district attorney seat came open when Michael Morrissey announced in January that he would not seek reelection. Seven Democrats ran. No Republican did. On Sept. 1, Democratic primary voters chose Djuna Perkins over Adam Deitch by about 2,600 votes, and Deitch conceded the next morning. Six of the seven candidates will not appear on the November ballot at all. An independent, former prosecutor Joe Pagliarulo of Millis, will — so November is contested. But the field went from seven to two in an election most Norfolk County voters did not take part in.
The scale of the problem is not in dispute. The Tufts Center for State Policy Analysis found that in 2024, 66 percent of Massachusetts legislative races had no primary opponent and no general election opponent. This year it is 59 percent.
Those patterns — no contest at all, or a contest settled in September — are what Question 3 is about.
What it would do
Question 3 would abolish separate Democratic and Republican primaries for state office. In their place, one September ballot would list every candidate for every office, each labeled with the party shown on their own voter registration. Every voter would get the same ballot. The top two finishers would advance to November regardless of party — including two candidates from the same party.
It takes effect Jan. 1, 2028, so it would first apply to the 2028 cycle, not this one.
It covers the offices Massachusetts holds state primaries for: governor and the other constitutional offices, U.S. Senate and House, state senator and representative, Governor’s Councillor, and the county and district offices — district attorney, sheriff, register of deeds, register of probate, county treasurer and county commissioner.
What it does not cover matters too: presidential primaries, municipal elections, and — as explained below — party committee elections.
Governor and lieutenant governor would run as a pre-formed ticket. A party could have “Endorsed by” printed beside a candidate’s name, but only on joint request. The certified version leaves general-election write-ins intact. That last point exists because the Attorney General rejected an earlier version of this petition, filed as 25-11, that would have eliminated write-ins in the general election, finding it inconsistent with the state constitution’s guarantee of free elections. The version on the ballot is 25-12.
A claim that needs correcting — including the campaign’s
The measure’s central pitch is that most Massachusetts voters are unenrolled — about 65 percent — and should not have to, in the campaign’s words, “temporarily ‘pick a party’” to vote in a primary.
Read literally, that is not accurate. Massachusetts law is explicit: an unenrolled voter may walk into the polls, request either party’s ballot, and remain unenrolled. “If the voter was unenrolled before selecting a party ballot, he shall continue to be unenrolled,” the statute reads. There is nothing to do in advance and nothing to undo afterward.
Massachusetts Democratic Party chair Steve Kerrigan makes exactly this objection: the measure “was created to solve a problem that doesn’t exist in Massachusetts.” Jordan Berg Powers, who chairs the opposition campaign, has argued that under current rules it is the “super partisan” — enrolled Democrats and Republicans, locked into their own party’s ballot — who are actually kept out.
Danielle Allen, the Harvard professor and former gubernatorial candidate who is the Yes campaign’s convening chair, has acknowledged that unenrolled voters can choose a ballot, and reframed the argument around what that choice costs: a voter picks one ballot and therefore one set of contested races. If the competitive district attorney’s race is on one party’s ballot and the competitive sheriff’s race is on the other’s, they have to choose. Under Question 3, every voter would weigh in on every contested race.
That is the real dispute, and it is a better one than the version on the campaign’s website.
What the research actually shows
The most common argument for systems like this is that they produce more moderate, less polarized legislatures. That claim does not hold up.
California has used a top-two primary since 2012 and Washington since 2008, and political scientists have studied both closely. Ahler, Citrin and Lenz, in a prize-winning 2016 study, found California voters could not reliably tell moderate candidates from extreme ones — and as a result chose candidates further from their own positions under the new ballot than under the old one. Kousser, Phillips and Shor found the reforms produced no improvement in how closely California legislators tracked their districts’ voters; if anything, they wrote, legislators strayed further. McGhee and Shor found a modest moderating effect, but only among California Democrats — not California Republicans, and not either party in Washington — and attributed much of it to independent redistricting and relaxed term limits rather than the primary system itself. The strongest pro-reform result, from Grose in 2020, is explicitly associational rather than causal.
The University of Chicago’s Center for Effective Government, reviewing the field, found the evidence for reduced polarization modest at best and “sensitive to specification, comparison group, and time period.”
The best-supported argument for Question 3 is a different one. In a study published this year, Sinclair and colleagues found that in safe California districts, the winner before the reform took office having been voted for by about 11 percent of the district’s registered voters. After the change, when two candidates of the same party met in November, that figure rose to about 34 percent. The share of safe-seat Democratic winners who faced no meaningful opposition fell from 67 percent to 50 percent.
That argument does not depend on moderation at all. It is about how many people are in the room when the decision gets made.
The turnout evidence runs the other way. A study published in PLOS ONE in December found that nonpartisan primaries were associated with substantially higher participation — roughly eight points among voters under 35, and larger effects among older voters. Those are cross-state comparisons, with the same methodological limits as the moderation research, but they are the most recent estimates available and they favor the case for Question 3.
And what it would cost
Two costs are well documented.
The first is minor parties. Richard Winger of Ballot Access News counted, as of 2021, 186 instances of a minor-party candidate running for federal or state office under top-two in Washington and California. Not one reached the November ballot in a race where both major parties fielded a candidate. With only two slots in the general election, a third-place finisher is off the printed ballot.
The second is what researchers call roll-off. When voters find no candidate from their own party in November, many skip the race entirely. One study of same-party general elections found undervoting nearly 20 percentage points higher among those voters; a second, describing its own evidence as suggestive, found overall turnout unaffected but roll-off higher by upwards of 7 percent.
Outright lockouts — where a party draws more primary votes but gets no candidate through — are rare but real. The cleanest case is Washington’s 2016 state treasurer race: three Democrats split 662,654 votes while two Republicans split 622,140, and both November candidates were Republicans. In California’s 31st congressional district in 2012, four Democrats split the vote in a district Barack Obama had carried by sixteen points, and two Republicans advanced. Supporters note these are a handful of cases out of more than a thousand elections. Opponents note that a handful is not zero.
The money
Campaign finance reports filed Sept. 4 show the most lopsided spending on the November ballot.
The Coalition for Healthy Democracy, which supports Question 3, has raised $5.1 million and spent $4.8 million this cycle — more than any other ballot committee in Massachusetts. Voter Rights MA, which opposes it, has raised $35,000 and spent $8,000.
Nine donors gave the Yes campaign $100,000 or more in 2026 alone, together accounting for roughly 72 percent of what it raised this year:
Andrew Balson of West Newton, Cove Hill Partners — $500,000
David Peeler of Cambridge, Berkshire Partners — $500,000
John Connaughton of Chestnut Hill, chairman of Bain Capital — $250,000
Mark Nunnelly of Boston — $250,000
Dwight Poler of Boston — $150,000
Robert Waldron of Boston, Curriculum Associates — $150,000
Paul Edgerley of Brookline, Bain Capital — $100,000
Jonathon Jacobson of Boston — $100,000
Liesel Pritzker Simmons of Cambridge, Blue Haven Initiative — $100,000
Paul Sagan of Cambridge, General Catalyst — $100,000
Below them is a $50,000 tier drawn from the same world: Charlesbank, Highland Capital, Beacon Capital, Charles River Ventures. The Leadership Now Project, a Washington, D.C. organization, gave $50,000. Danielle Allen herself has given the campaign $250.
The opposition’s money comes from two sources and no individuals at all: the Massachusetts Democratic State Committee gave $25,000, and SEIU Local 509’s political committee gave $10,000, with small in-kind contributions from Progressive Massachusetts and other SEIU affiliates.
That the state Democratic Party is directly funding the opposition to a ballot question is unusual and worth stating plainly. So is the concentration on the other side: a reform campaign premised on reducing the influence of party insiders is financed largely by a few dozen people in Boston finance.
Both campaigns make a money argument about the other. Berg Powers says the measure “really hurts people who are teachers, who want to run for office, social workers, people who work with their hands for a living,” because candidates would have to campaign twice. The mechanism is plausible; neither side has produced research isolating a top-two effect on campaign spending.
What it would mean for county offices here
Neither campaign has said much about what this would mean for county races. The Yes campaign’s materials list county and district offices among those covered, but I could find nothing from either side about the effect on them — and county offices are where this would land most visibly for readers here.
The honest answer for Plymouth County is deflationary. Question 3 would have changed nothing in the 2022 district attorney or sheriff races. Cruz was unopposed in the Republican primary; Rahsaan Hall was unopposed in the Democratic primary. Under top-two, both would have advanced and the November ballot would have looked the same. The sheriff’s race was the same story — Joseph McDonald unopposed, no Democrat filed.
Where it would bite is a race like Norfolk County’s this year. In 2022, 85,977 ballots were cast in the Norfolk County Democratic primary for district attorney. That November, 287,919 ballots were cast in the general election. Under Question 3, the top two finishers from this year’s seven-way field would have gone before that larger electorate.
There is a wrinkle that cuts the other way, and it is worth stating. County races are where Massachusetts voters stop marking their ballots. In the 2022 Plymouth County sheriff’s race, 59,623 voters left the line blank — 27.5 percent of everyone who cast a ballot. In the 2020 county commissioner race, 42 percent of available votes went unmarked. Moving a decision into the November electorate only widens participation if November voters actually fill in the county line. Many of them do not.
