Today is Election Day, and Massachusetts has a lot at stake. The candidate races aren't so interesting this year since there's little real competition, but the initiatives definitely are: it's the most on the ballot since 1994 (when I both didn't live in Massachusetts and definitely was not old enough to vote). Here's the Boston DSA voting guide, which makes the same recommendations as Progressive Mass.
I won't go into the entire process of how a petition becomes law here in MA, but let me make a general statement: ballot initiatives typically suck and are not "more democratic", actually.
This sucks and I can prove it
Money has become the core element of American politics. The entire apparatus has become a financialized and well-understood industry. Yes there's a lot of variance - there's always room for an "October Surprise", after all - but every serious player in this field has good models of how much voter shift is needed, how much media buy would need to happen to reach that, and therefore how much money a win will cost.
This trend is occurring everywhere, but has now reached signature collection campaigns in Massachusetts. The amount of signatures required (~75,000) makes it hard to imagine getting on the ballot solely by "word of mouth" without financial backing. Yet it's a low enough number that you can get relatively unpopular measures onto the ballot with even a modest backing (low $millions, something like $dollars per vote). It's kind of a worst of both worlds, making it challenging for all but the most organized activists but still easy for even a moderately rich eccentric.
The money involved goes into the signature collection process and pushes it towards being predatory, or even downright illegal. Remedies are limited, too. This past year, there were many credible accusations of fraud and other misleading practices on the "Question 8" campaign (like pretending to collect signatures for other petitions). Unfortunately, only a handful of signatures were revoked as a result, and mainly due to "procedural" issues like missing paperwork. The bar is very high for removing any individual signature, and there isn't a mechanism for pursuing (much less punishing) any wide-scale deception or fraud. Even if "Question 8" doesn't succeed at rolling back marijuana laws in Massachusetts, it's likely that the precedent has been set for increased ballot initiative signature fraud in future years.
When we get to the ballot itself, there's no attempt made to distinguish the overall impact of the initiatives. Questions 1, 3, 4, and 5 will have massive impacts on future MA politics - yet the "Statement of Fiscal Consequences" on Question 5 doesn't even have a single number. Question 6 is effectively a non-binding resolution, and Question 2 is about a relatively small labor dispute. Every initiative gets presented equally, even though they have completely different impacts on the state.
The outcomes of the initiatives also leave much to be desired. Take Question 6: Natural Resource Conservation Fund. This fund will get the same amount of money whether it reaches 50% support or 90% support, and it's tied to specific types of retailers: you have to approve both the amount and the source of money. It also becomes a mandate to allocate one portion of money in a particular way... but doesn't say that money from other sources couldn't be reduced. So it could actually become effectively non-binding, no matter how many people support it.
It's not really a surprise that pretty much every endorsement-granting org said "we don't wanna provide an opinion on this one"!
The only way to fight bad democracy is with more democracy
In this time of rising fascism, we do need more democracy. But having voted on something is not inherently democratic: who decided what you got to vote on in the first place? Or what other options were presented, or how they were communicated and contrasted? Were those processes democratic?
Democracy is about decisionmaking by the people, and voting is simply a tool that can be used to accomplish that. But dictators love holding elections too, insofar as they can properly manage the outcomes.
Ballot initiatives like this are typically a bad form of governance. They incentivize emotional appeals, misleading wording or presentation, and hidden or deferred issues in accounting and/or complexity. California has been wracked by this kind of decisionmaking for years. We do not need it in Massachusetts.
Now, I am a political science major, which means I have a kind of brain disorder that forces me to have opinions about ranked choice voting. I'm also heavily involved in cooperative and solidarity economy spaces, so I love to read about liquid democracy or sociocracy.
Believe me when I say that none of that stuff is coming to Massachusetts any time soon!
So, let's focus on the basics. We aren't getting anything without a baseline of accountability and transparency: so, sure, go vote for Yes on 1. It might help with what is regularly regarded as the least transparent state house in the country. But there are some issues with that initiative, similar to the previous DiZoglio attempts to secure audit rights, so it's not an obvious slam dunk either.
But getting true transparency is not just about "auditing the bastards" and is going to be a long haul requiring civic participation. A call for transparency without becoming a public capable of digesting that transparency is part of an "anti-elite" politics that achieves wins by devaluing concepts like expertise, scientific understanding, and bureaucracy. When you see it that way, you can actually understand how this is part of Trump's success: these views are widely bipartisan. Many people were actually at least a little curious to "drain the swamp", until they realized the swamp was load-bearing.
We don't get out of that state of affairs by going back to decisions made in smoke-filled rooms, but we also don't get out of it by giving voters jungle primaries, or incoherent lists of laws to vote on, or more information than they know what to do with.
We will get where we want to be by building a competent, effective, and trustworthy bureaucratic apparatus that is accountable to everyone in Massachusetts. And yes that should include more radical concepts of what democracy can be! But that always has to keep in mind the specifics of this state, the problems we're actually facing, and the development of civic organizations and their membership. Otherwise we'll just build a different notionally "democratic" structure that's easy for someone to suborn.