Massachusetts Ballot Questions – Recent Decisions

Senior Counsel Neal Quenzer contributed a Case Comment for the July 2023 issue of the Massachusetts Law Review, published by the Massachusetts Bar Association.

The Case Comment discusses four recent Massachusetts ballot questions, highlighting decisions of the Supreme Judicial Court that addressed whether the proposed questions satisfied the relatedness requirement of Article 48 of the Amendments to the Massachusetts Constitution. The relatedness requirement aims to ensure that each ballot question contains only "related subjects."

The cases covered in the Case Comment include:

• Anderson v. Attorney General: A case concerning a proposed constitutional amendment to impose an income surtax on high earners for education and transportation funding. The relatedness requirement did not apply to this question since the amendment was initiated by the legislature. The court held that the attorney general's summary of the amendment was constitutionally sufficient to