The opinions expressed below are those of Jon Keller, not those of WBZ, CBS News or Paramount Global.
BOSTON – On Election Day, voters said yes to several ballot initiatives in Massachusetts. But that doesn’t mean they have the final say.
Question 1, which gave the state auditor the ability to audit the legislature, passed overwhelmingly, with more than 71% of the vote. And nearly 60% of voters approved Question 2, which means high school students will no longer have to pass the MCAS exam to graduate.
But will state lawmakers tinker with these new laws — or scrap them altogether?
Question 1
“Legislative leaders are still looking for a way out,” said Comptroller Diana DiZoglio, the driving force behind Question 1. And she is urging voters to back their votes with even more pressure on state leaders. “We are reaching out to people across the board in Massachusetts and asking you to please call your legislator and the governor,” she said.
But remember, “the legislature’s prerogative is to make and amend laws,” notes Evan Horowitz of the Tufts Center for State Policy Analysis. While the auditor can look at the Legislature’s handling of its own resources, he says, its authority to deliver on its promise to investigate internal procedures such as committee assignments and voice votes is on shaky legal footing.
“The Legislature, besides changing the law, can just defund the accounting firm, or have a department that says we fund the accounting firm, but none of those dollars can be used to audit the Legislature.” , Horowitz said. “Maybe it’s better to think of this as the roadrunner and the coyote [from the old cartoons]with the auditor playing the role of coyote and the legislature playing the role of roadrunner. They have a lot of ways to get away.”
Question 2 Eliminate MCAS
And despite the teachers unions’ talk in their campaign ads about replacing MCAS with Question 2 with local control over graduation standards, they are already discussing new statewide standards on Beacon Hill that would require completing prescribed courses rather than passing a single test.
“It felt like a referendum on MCAS, but it wasn’t,” Horowitz said. “It was a referendum on whether the state should have a role in deciding whether there should be statewide standards and who should graduate from high school. And I think there’s some wiggle room there.”
Many voters seem to think that these types of voting questions are a form of direct democracy, allowing them to bypass the legislature, but that is not entirely true. Most state legislatures can, and sometimes do, tinker with ballot questions after they become law, and there are cases like the taxpayer financing of the election law passed in 1998 where they ultimately repealed it altogether.
Voters can retaliate against lawmakers who do so in elections, but rarely do so.
