History of the Ballot Measure in Massachusetts

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So what’s the deal, why didn’t I include all those other ballot questions that came before 1919, including the 19 state constitutional amendments that were voted on the year prior? Well, firstly, when I started this project, I only had the data from the State website, and this is where they started from. And as I read more about all of it, the process for people to force this direct democracy on our laws did not exist before 1919. The only way for a ballot question to reach the voting public was if the legislature wanted it, and this was mainly reserved for amendments. If the people (those allowed to vote at the time) didn’t like a law, outside of voting for another guy the next year, they didn’t have many options. There was no ‘people’s veto,’ as one could call it. This, and the few other ballot measure types, would only come into existence after the 1918 election. But, what’s the story?

Well…

The road to what we now know as a Ballot measure, or question, or initiative petition, was a long and rough one, and the support for this initiative was not resolute throughout the Commonwealth. While discussions began in the 1890s, and attempts to create the ballot initiative met various dead ends throughout the early 1900s, the process finally started in 1913. The first step toward the statewide ballot was when a public opinion law passed in the fall of ‘13, which allowed a “petition of a certain number of voters in a given district [that] a question of public policy might be submitted to the voters of that district, but no vote under this law was to be regarded as an ‘instruction’ less an affirmative answer was given by a majority of the entire number who voted at that election.” [This is an excerpt from How Massachusetts Adopted the Initiative and Referendum, an article by George Haynes from the September 1919 edition of the Political Science Quarterly, published by Oxford University Press. This is my main source for this history, and where thew few quotes will be coming from. Link here.]

Proponents took advantage of the new public opinion law, and in 1916, put the Initiative Referendum to a vote in 37 (out of what I believe to be 40) districts. It passed in all of them, and in nine districts, the legislators were legally compelled to back the initiative referendum. Seeing the support, the backers of what would be known as the I. and R. decided to take a different route. Rather than try to force it through a General Court that was unfriendly to the idea, they decided to call for a state constitutional convention. Why did they believe that this was the best way forward? Well, there was already sentiment that the state needed a change:

“But the anomaly of an unrevised eighteenth-century constitution still persisting as the fundamental law of a twentieth-century state was stressed with such effect by the direct-legislationists (sic) that the legislature of 1916 submitted to the people the question whether or not a constitutional convention should be held with the result that a vote of 217,293, to 120,979 was given in favor...”

From there, a group calling itself the Union for a Progressive Constitution put forth a plan for the convention called The Massachusetts Plan. While this plan sounded like it would be all-encompassing, it mainly focused on the initiative and referendum amendment, or the I. and R. Those running for a seat at the convention were harshly scrutinized by voters and the press if they appeared not to support the Massachusetts Plan. And so “The election resulted in a convention, a majority of whose 320 members were claimed by the Union for a Progressive Constitution as pledged to vote for the” Mass. Plan.

Before it could start, the convention ran into a big problem: The Great War. Months before the convention began, the U.S. formally joined WW1, taking the convention out of people’s minds for a time. After some discussion, the conventioners decided to go ahead and begin deliberation.

In the summer of 1917, the convention began with debate on the I. and R. and an Anti-Aid amendment, but that was taken care of quickly. It took over three months for the committees and conventioners to hammer out all the details for the initiative referendum, and finally, on November 28, it was approved. The convention adjourned until the summer of 1918, where it then took care of the other 18 amendments.

On November 5, 1918, alongside all the regular races, 19 ballot questions were brought to the public, with Question Number 1 reading:

“Shall the Article of Amendment relative to the establishment of the popular initiative and referendum and the legislative initiative of specific amendments of the Constitution, submitted by the Constitutional Convention, be approved and ratified?”

For the full text of the amemndment (and the other 18), please visit this page.

The results:

And then the following year, the commonwealth had a ballot with two questions, one that was Similar to a Constitutional Amendment and another which was the first Referendum Petition on an Existing Law.

I hope my summary of this story is a satisfying account of this amazing time in our State’s history. I couldn’t include all the information from the Political Science Quarterly article. The article goes into much greater detail about the entire process, including the yes and no campaigns leading up to the general election. I highly recommend checking it out, and it has small magazine pages, so the 22 pages go by quickly! Once again, here’s the link.

To check out the other 1918 amendments, go here. Just note that for some reason, their order is messed up.

To learn about the modern day rules of the initiative process, go here.

Thank you to all the archivists from the state, feds, Ballotpedia, archive.org, and many more. This was a fun project for me to take on, especially as a distraction from everything else.
I’ll keep updating with new questions, and fixing little things here and there.

Thank you for visiting!

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