There was no mistaking the will of the people on Question 1.
Voters overwhelmingly approved the ballot measure on Election Day, with more than 86% backing an expansion of Massachusetts’ public records law to include the Legislature and the governor’s office. It was the widest margin of any of the nine ballot questions in an election in which nearly 1.17 million people had cast ballots before polls opened.
Over the summer, the state Senate passed a bill promoting transparency and public access in state government. But, concerned about the separation of powers and the lengthy litigation that could follow from passing a blanket expansion of the law, lawmakers in both chambers of the Legislature proposed versions of the bill that subject the governor’s office to existing public records laws, as the ballot question does, but that narrow public access to the Legislature.
The bills’ framework would keep lawmakers’ emails private and includes language that, if passed into law, would supersede the more expansive ballot question.
State Sen. Jo Comerford, D-Northampton, voted for the bill on the Senate floor in July and voted yes on Question 1. She said the result shows that both the public and the Legislature value transparency.
Comerford said the Legislature’s bill will likely pass. Question 1 landed on the ballot this year, she said, because the independent effort to put the issue before voters began long ago.
“I think it passed very overwhelmingly,” she said.
Comerford said the bill in the Legislature will likely pass, and Question 1 landed on the ballot this year because the independent effort to put the issue before voters began long ago. “The ballot initiatives have long arcs,” she explained.
Lora Wondolowski, D-Greenfield, who on Tuesday bested Amy Lavallee to be elected the 1st Franklin District’s next representative, also voted yes.
“As somebody coming from municipal government, we have to uphold certain open meeting laws and record information,” said Wondolowski, who currently serves as Greenfield City Council president. “I think the Legislature should be held to the same standards that we are at the local level.”
State Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa, D-Northampton, who voted yes, said the result shows a clear demand for transparency in the legislative process. But she said the ballot question is a mandate without a framework for carrying it out, and an important next step will be working out details such as where the public should submit requests and how lawmakers should process them.
“If it is a question of staffers trying to comply, it would shut down my legislative office,” Sabadosa said. “It either means that it will make us less productive, or it means that our emails will then be turned over to some third party who will then make decisions for us, which of course reduces privacy and changes the entire nature of the relationships between constituents and legislators. I really don’t know how it’s going to be implemented, but I have confidence that we will figure out a way to make it work.”
Messages left with the offices of senators Jacob Oliveira, D-Ludlow, and Paul Mark, D-Peru, and representatives Mindy Domb, D-Amherst, and Homar Gomez, D-Easthampton, received no response.
Massachusetts is one of the two states with public records laws that shield its legislature and its governor’s office. Earlier this year, the Society of Professional Journalists branded the state with a “Black Hole Award,” a dishonor reserved for government entities that “demonstrate a troubling lack of transparency and disregard for the public’s right to know.”
The state’s deficiencies included weak enforcement mechanisms, delayed responses and, as Question 1 was designed to close, broad exemptions. With it, voters have endorsed releasing documents such as state contracts, financial records and settlement agreements to the public while continuing to exempt lawmakers’ conversations about constituent services and policy-making, including with lobbyists. These changes are expected to go into effect in January 2027.
UMass Amherst political science professor Raymond La Raja explained that there are some legitimate reasons for government opacity: Lawmakers may want to protect their constituents’ confidentiality and their freedom to broker deals with their political peers.
But “most Americans, including most people in Massachusetts, they think government should be transparent,” La Raja said. “Transparency in government is apple pie for Americans. They think that that’s part of democracy, that to hold our elected officials accountable, they need to be transparent.”
A UMass/WCVB poll co-directed by La Raja last month showed support for Question 1 garnering the greatest level of certainty among voters: 55% of respondents answered that they would “definitely” vote yes and 29% said that they would “probably” vote yes.
Only support for Question 9, the referendum on recreational cannabis, and Question 4, approval for same-day voter registration, approached the same degree of certainty — 49% and 41% of respondents answered they would “definitely” vote yes on these questions, respectively.
La Raja surmised that the clarity of the question’s phrasing and the straightforwardness of its premise, government transparency, both helped it succeed. UMass’s polling showed very little voter confusion around Question 1. By comparison, 14% of respondents said they didn’t understand Question 2 on public defender collective bargaining, and 8% said they didn’t understand Question 5 on state tax revenue.
Across both sides of the aisle, between respondents with a college degree and those with only a high school diploma, support for Question 1 was virtually unanimous. Independents and respondents who earn an annual income of less than $40,000 were less likely to support the question, according to UMass’s polling.
Privacy concerns
Concerns about constituents’ sensitive information being exposed through public records requests are precisely what drove state Sen. Aaron Saunders and state Rep. Susannah Whipps, on the other hand, to vote against Question 1.
“I was among the 15% or so [to vote against the question],” Saunders said, adding that he had voted in favor of the transparency reform bill in the state Senate.
He said he values transparency but has concerns about creating hardships for people who communicate with his office under the presumption of absolute privacy. For example, he explained, his office received a report of a constituent documenting an alleged sexual assault. He said he would hate for a victim’s name to be published as a type of collateral damage from granting a public records request.
“We’re in the business, by and large, of protecting folks,” he said.
The law allows for appropriate redactions of sensitive information, but the possibility of a mistake being made, Whipps said, is why she voted no at the ballot box.
She said she has one staff member who is tasked with redacting any words regarding health problems, child custody issues, finances and other sensitive information. If her office receives a flood of public records requests, Whipps said she could foresee needing to hire another staffer to handle redactions, an expensive challenge for taxpayers.
Beyond the administrative burden, Whipps said that, as a former Athol Select Board member, she understands the importance of transparency but does not want constituents stripped of their privacy in the process.
“I’ve been saying this for years, people don’t come to my office when their house is warm and their cupboard is full. I don’t want anyone to be damaged by this need for transparency,” she said. “People deserve dignity and deserve respect. Where do you draw the line?”
State Sen. John Velis, D-Westfield, said the personal information his office receives from constituents seeking his help runs the gamut of sensitivity.
“If you were to look at my emails on a daily basis, you could get everything from ‘Hey, I’m going to be evicted from my place,’ ‘I’m a victim of sexual assault,’ the list goes on and on,” Velis said.
He voted in favor of Question 1 based on the understanding that it precludes private and identifying constituent information from being shared, which it does. “It’s common sense that that information needs to be protected,” Velis said. “As written, I think it covers the only concern that I would have.”
The ACLU of Massachusetts said it was thrilled to see voters’ “overwhelming support” for the ballot initiative, but that it expects inevitable constitutional and legislative hurdles ahead. Earlier this year, the state’s Supreme Judicial Court declined to respond to three of the Senate’s questions about the legality of the bill, including whether or not it would violate the state constitution by “infringing on the Senate’s power to set its own ‘rules of proceedings’.”
To avoid lengthy legal battles and to ensure immediate and uninterrupted access to public documents, the organization said it is advocating for the “strongest possible version [of these bills] to emerge from both chambers.”
“It’s long past time to apply state public records law to the Governor and the Legislature,” the ACLU of Massachusetts said in a statement. “At the same time, we are concerned that Question 1 sets up a constitutional challenge that will keep public records expansion tangled in court for years — just like what’s happened with the audit. That would delay public access indefinitely, and in the end, the public could be blocked entirely.”
Common Cause Massachusetts, a nonpartisan, pro-democracy advocacy organization that has, for decades, pushed for public records reform, said it supports a “tailored” framework that can “survive legal challenge on day one.”
“By enacting this constitutionally sound statute, lawmakers can deliver real, enforceable transparency immediately rather than another protracted courtroom standoff,” Executive Director Geoff Foster said in a statement to the Gazette.
Anthony Cammalleri contributed reporting.
