There are five statewide ballot questions up for a vote in the 2024 Massachusetts general election. They are all significant, and you should put serious thought into each of them and make a considered decision about how to vote. Below are my personal recommendations and reasoning for your consideration.
Each section title links to the background information provided to voters by the Secretary of State’s office as required by law.
TLDR vote YES on all five questions.
Question 1: State Auditor’s Authority to Audit the Legislature
Vote YES on Question 1.
The Massachusetts legislature is a dumpster fire. There has been some improvement in recent years (e.g., it’s no longer quite as likely as it once was for the Speaker of the House to end up in prison for corruption after his term), but it isn’t enough.
The legislature continues to treat itself above accountability, e.g., by exempting itself and its staff from public records laws, and by even most of the most (supposedly) progressive legislators opposing the unionization of legislative staff.
If the legislature isn’t going to provide sufficient oversight over their own operations, then the State Auditor needs to do it.
One academic who testified at a legislative hearing about this question said the proposed change would constitute “an unprecedented transfer of power from the people’s representatives into the Executive Branch,” but the position of State Auditor is also elected by the people and therefore also represents them, and if they don’t like what the auditor does with the power to audit the legislature, then they can vote for someone else in the next election.
The organization leading the campaign in favor of this question is headquartered in Massachusetts. The organization leading the campaign against is headquartered in Connecticut, and its web site doesn’t work as of September 20 when I checked. When there are red flags like that, you should pay attention to them.
Question 2: Elimination of MCAS as High School Graduation Requirement
Vote YES on Question 2.
Standardized testing is bad. It harms educational outcomes and does a terrible job of measuring either student ability or school performance. There are reams and reams of data proving it discriminates against disadvantaged students (the absolute chutzpah of the opponents of this question to claim that they are the ones trying to reduce inequality in education cannot be overstated). Forcing teachers to “teach to the test,” as the MCAS most assuredly does, sabotages their ability to design curricula that are appropriate and effective for their students.
Private schools in Massachusetts are not required to administer the MCAS to their students. And yet as you no doubt know, college admission figures for private schools are consistently higher than for the state’s public schools.
The people advocating to eliminate MCAS as a graduation requirement are not, as opponents suggest, trying to eliminate all educational standards or graduation requirements. They’re trying to replace MCAS with better requirements, and claiming otherwise is specious. When one side in a debate needs to use specious arguments like that, you should be highly suspicious.
The most prominent testimony mentioned in the majority report against eliminating the MCAS requirement is actually an argument in favor of eliminating the requirement. DESE claims that incredibly few students are prevented from graduating due to not passing the MCAS. If that’s the case, then guess what: the MCAS is not an effective tool for determining who should be allowed to graduate, and therefore we shouldn’t be using it as one.
Assessing school performance is hard. DESE wants to preserve MCAS because it’s easy for them to point at trends in MCAS results in a particular school or school district and cite that as proof of how well the school is doing. I love “objective data,” data as much as anybody, but I don’t think we should be collecting data at the expense of harming students’ education, and anyone who thinks that there isn’t bias built into standardized testing is deluding themselves.
Question 3: Unionization for Transportation Network Drivers
Votes YES on Question 3.
No one showed up at the legislature’s hearing on this question to testify in opposition to it, and yet the legislature still somehow managed to come up with bullshit F.U.D. reasons to recommend against it.
Workers should be allowed form unions, full stop.
Uber and Lyft drivers work under horrible conditions, and the companies they drive for consistently lie about those conditions. Their justification for why people should vote against this question is no exception.
The “gig economy” puts too much power in the hands of corporations and takes too much power away from workers. Allowing workers to unionize puts some of that power back in their hands. There will still be a power imbalance, but it will be smaller.
This one isn’t a close call.
Question 4: Limited Legalization and Regulation of Certain Natural Psychedelic Substances
Vote YES on Question 4.
This is a tough one, but ultimately I come out in favor.
There is a growing body of evidence that treatment with micro-dosing of the psychedelics that would be legalized by this initiative can be have incredibly positive impacts on the mental health of people with conditions such as severe depression and PTSD. The government is moving too slowly to recognize these benefits and legalize these treatments, and therefore an initiative petition is an appropriate mechanism for forcing faster progress.
Many of the concerns expressed by opponents can be addressed by the legislature with additional legislation after the fact if it proves to be necessary. I do not believe that the alarmist, hypothetical dangers cited by opponents outweighs the real-life harm that people are suffering right now because these treatments are inaccessible to them.
I am generally extremely skeptical about drug laws and would tend to lean toward legalization in general. I was also in favor of marijuana legalization in Massachusetts. I do believe there have been some negative effects of marijuana legalization, but they have not bee nearly as bad as opponents fretted they would be, and overall I believe the benefit has far outweighed the harm. I see no reason why this would be different.
Question 5: Minimum Wage for Tipped Workers
(I note with some amusement that as of September 20 when I wrote this blog posting, the HTML page title, i.e., the title that shows up in the browser tab for the page, of the Security of State’s page for this question is a copy of the page title from Question 4. They apparently forgot to edit the title when copying the Question 4 page as a template for the Question 5 page. I hope / assume that by the time you read this, this will have been fixed.)
Vote YES on Question 5.
General rule: if your business can’t survive while paying its employees a living wage, then you shouldn’t be in business.
Tipping was never intended to be what it has become in the restaurant industry in the United States. Restaurants are supposed to pay their employees a decent wage, and tipping is supposed to be a reward by the consumer over and above that for good service.
The vast majority of restaurant workers want to be paid a minimum wage.
If restaurants close after they are forced to pay their workers a minimum wage, then other restaurants will take their place.
If restaurants become more expensive (including decent tips for the servers in that calculation!) after they are forced to pay their workers a minimum wage, then those restaurants were taking advantage of their workers and deserved to be forced out of business.
Even now, with the sub-minimum wage still in place, many restaurants are understaffed. The market is speaking: people are not willing to work at restaurants because restaurant workers do not make enough money to live on. This needs to change.
The minimum wage exists for a reason. The sub-minimum wage needs to be abolished.
