Ballot Proposals for 2024 are out!

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Today we discuss seven of the proposed ballot measures for 2024. We cover 1. one fair wage, 2. rent control, 3. same day voter registration, 4. MCAS, 5. Uber/Lyft, 6. auditing the legislature, and 7. psychedelics. We'll give you our analysis of each of these so you understand how they might impact you and those you love.

Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan as we chat about Massachusetts politics. This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 22. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to Incorruptible Mass. Our mission here is to help us all transform state politics. Together, we know that we can make Massachusetts legislature and the laws here reflect the policies that are needed by the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful state.

So today we are going to talk about the new proposed ballot measures for 2024 and we hope we'll try and quickly cover as many of these as we can. We're going to talk about One fair wage. We're going to talk about same day voter registration, rent control, the MCAS educational tests, the Uber related one.

We'll talk about auditing the legislature and then a little treat at the end talking about psychedelics. That's what we hope to cover today. But before we do, I will introduce these amazing and wonderful co hosts that know so much about everything that is going on.

I will start with Jonathan Cohn. Jonathan Cohn. He him his joining from Boston. I've been involved in different issue and electoral campaigns in Massachusetts for a number of years and always happy to be here. 

And Jordan Berg Powers. Jordan Berg powers. He him. And I have gone through six ballot initiative cycles and I don't know, I guess I feel like I have the scars to prove it, having worked for many years. But I do love being here talking about them.

And I am Anna Callahan. She her coming at you from Medford. Totally love local politics, totally love state politics and love being here with the two of you and with all of our listeners.

Thank you so much for being here. We will start off today. Jordan Berg powers. Tell us about one fair wage. 

Yeah, so One Fair Wage is a ballot initiative to close the gap on tipped minimum wage. So for those of you don't know, people who have tipped jobs are paid less than people who with a regular minimum job.

We have a sub minimum wage for them. That was created when the minimum wage was created because the majority of the jobs, the two places where there is a carve out for the minimum wage, farming and tipped were done by black people predominantly. And so when they did the minimum wage, they were like, we can't pay black people the same as white people, but we can't explicitly discriminate.

So we're going to carve out the two industries where they overrepresent the one that is left. The worst is the tipped minimum wage. Unless you work at a place that serves alcohol, you are making less than the minimum wage.

Even if they serve alcohol, you're still likely barely getting there and worse off than all of those things. Places that have tips are predominantly now jobs done by women and women with tip jobs face a lot of sexual harassment that they have little recourse for because that's the difference between them getting their full paycheck or not. And so it's a racist policy that whose old time has come.

Studies have shown that people still tip. Ask anybody right now. There's plenty of jokes about it on the Internet, that they're asking for tips everywhere.

We can get rid of it. We should get rid of it. And I'm excited that ballot initiative is going to hopefully be on your ballot unless the legislature just does the right thing and fixes it.

Yes. Fantastic. Next one.

Jonathan, tell us a little bit about rent control. Okay. And before I do that, I just want to give a quick step back for folks about why we're talking ballot initiatives.

Oh, yes, thank you. Because last week was the deadline for organizations seeking to file ballot initiatives for next year, to file language with the Attorney general's office. That was last Wednesday.

The time that we're recording this. Not necessarily last Wednesday, but the time that you're listening to this, August 2. And people need to file the language with the Attorney general's office because they need to be cleared for constitutionality in order to go forward.

And then signature collection will start in September. For ballot initiatives, they need to do a round of signature collection this fall that the legislature can then choose to do something. And if the legislature doesn't, or if they're not happy, they have to do signature collection again next summer to make the ballot for next November.

And 42 languages were placed, some of them somewhat repetitive languages. But there's 42 separate ballot initiatives that could, in theory, appear before you on the November ballot of 2024. Absolutely.

And this is an opportunity for you to find out what things you might be able to help get signatures for to make sure that they do get on the ballot should the legislature not take action. Yeah. The other thing I was noting that state Rep. Mike Connolly had filed language about lifting the statewide ban on rent control that folks may remember because we've talked about this on the podcast before, that rent control was banned in Massachusetts in 1994 by ballot measure, is that right? Yes. I think that people often forget when even talking about this, that it was a very close ballot initiative, that it only ended up being a 51-49 race, 51.3 to 48.7.

All of the municipalities that had rent control voted against banning it. And so it was largely like affluent suburban parts of the state telling the cities that they can't have passed their own laws and that we have lived with that for almost three decades since. And it's been nice to see greater attention in recent years to kind of rent control or rent stabilization.

However people want to talk about it as an issue with greater attention in the number of cities, especially as the housing market has gotten outright unsustainable in terms of how high rents have gotten in a number of places. And currently, if any municipality wants to pass a rent stabilization ordinance, it has to happen through home rule where they ask the legislature to approve it. And the legislature is not the quickest or most amenable body all the time.

Well, let's be a little clearer. Like every time anyone has requested to pass rent control, they've been denied. Is that not accurate? 

Yes.

That every city that has requested it –? 

There hasn't been, let's say, a lot of requests since then.

But as communities are getting interested in filing it, the legislature isn't telegraphing its eagerness to do so. So there's needed pressure on the legislature for that. But we should really make it so that municipalities can pass their own laws.

Exactly. Underneath it all, it's kind of a question of democracy. Can our elected officials at the local level pass things that is needed at that local level in that particular municipality? Yes.

Or, you know, a lot of people talk about how Republican states have preemptive laws. They will preempt cities’ ability to do certain things. And yet in Massachusetts, we are just constitutionally, and also by this ballot measure, for example, we are preempted from being able to pass many different laws around wages and a lot of affordable housing laws, as well as this rent control issue. So our state is not a particularly progressive state when it comes to preemptive laws, but this is one of those cases, and it happens to be because of a previous ballot measure. I would love to move us on to the next one.

Jordan, talk to us about same day voter registration. Yeah, same day voter reg is in place with some other initiatives around voting. And so same day voter reg is something that's really important.

It really marries perfectly with rent control. A lot of people are forced to move around. This is rent season.

You yourself might have had to move recently. And same day voter reg just makes it easy. It says if you live in this place and you can prove you live there, you should be able to vote there.

That's it. That's what it says. Any sort of other delay in those are just forms of sort of keeping people away from the ballot.

They are forms of voter suppression. Anything that doesn't allow somebody to vote where they live is a form of voter suppression. We are one of the few states in the north that still does not have same day voter registration, and this ballot initiative would bring it along.

It's in conjunction with some things that I think I'm sort of forward, some things I have lots of questions about. But one of the other ones that I think is important is it's also in conjunction with a ballot initiative, which I should disclose that I'm one of the lead Ted signatures on. So Sam day voter edge, full disclosure.

And the other is on requiring if you're spending money, that you have to sign something that says you're not getting foreign money. So currently anybody can spend money on Massachusetts politics. There's no things we don't know where the money's coming from.

And so it's a little black box. And so it would make at least you have to file something that discloses that that's not from a foreign entity. There are some other pieces around the voting that I think are also some questions, but I think same day voter register easily the most important and would really transform our ability to just allow people to vote where they live, which is what should happen.

Yeah. And 23 other states already have same day voter registration. So this is not anything where we're, like, leading the country or doing some radical idea.

This is very basic. Very basic. Right.

And shameful that we're behind. Exactly. Jonathan, talk to us a little bit about educational stuff, specifically the MCAS.

Yeah. So the Mass Teachers Association MTA filed a ballot initiative to end the MCAS graduation requirement. MCAS being kind of the state kind of standardized test, and that Massachusetts is currently one of, let's say, fewer than ten states in the country that require kind of where the state standardized test is a requirement for kind of requirement for graduation, that all states have to have testing in certain grades because of the federal government.

But rather than treating that as, like, a diagnostic thing, massachusetts is one of is kind of uncommon among states and actually making it kind of connecting it to graduation itself, which can have a disproportionate impact on, say, like, special education students or kind of English language learners who often would have greater difficulty in test taking skills. Yeah. Jordan, you looked like you were going to say no, no, I have lots of thoughts about the MCAS, but we could talk.

We should do a whole thing about the MCAS. Indeed. Wonderful.

We are going to go on and talk, and Jordan, if you can give us a little bit of history of this Uber ballot measure, the Uber related ballot measure, because we did have something recently. So tell us a little bit about that historically and as well as now, and you seem to be muted, yet thankfully.

We should go back to the podcast that we did on this. As a reminder to folks, we did a fantastic conversation when this came up two years ago. So there was an attempt.

I just think it's really important to note that the billionaires are back for your wallet. They have an initiative that they say is just about Uber lyft. But it's really a reforming of our economy to say that any person, regardless of what you do for a living, you don't work for your corporation, and your corporation owes you no protections.

It owes you no health care, it owes you no if you get hurt on the job, it owes you every person. If this is passed, the theory of how the economy should work, according to billionaires, is the Uberification of our economy. We are all at the mercy of them.

We work at will of them, and they just pay us when they feel like it. That is the essence, right? Uber and left a lake on that. They came into the marketplace disrupting taxicabs.

There were penny cabs. Uber is not an interesting or creative thing. Black people and Latino people had been doing end arounds around the cabs for years.

The police harassed them. The police arrested them. The police constantly stopped them when white billionaires put it on your phone, then all of a sudden, nothing happened.

No one arrested the people at Uber. No one harassed them like they did, like the penny cabs or the other forms of livery. That was happening all the time, right? This is not a new idea.

That idea that regular people could just drive you to where you want to go, uber made it thing, and now what they want to do is break apart our laws that protect people. To say that it does not matter how much you drive for them. It does not matter if you do anything else, you will never be an employee of them, and they owe you no protections. Vis-a-vis the thing, that's what they want to enshrine into law, because it's clear that the way that they're currently, as a business model, are breaking Massachusetts laws and frankly, breaking federal laws. They want to change our laws through the ballot initiative.

They want to buy the ability to change our economy. And I think it's really important that we frame it in that world. There is also some pushback from one of the people to reframe that.

I think ultimately, what's most important is that you not buy the lies that you will see on your phone, on your advertising, because all of these companies are interested in this ballot initiative. They want the ability to change how you are in relation to them. They want to be able to take more from you and owe you less protections.

They don't want to pay for your health insurance. They don't want to pay for your 401K. They don't want to pay if you get hurt on the job.

They don't want to pay for your paid family medical leave. This bill would take away those rights. And what we saw in California is that the knock on effect was not just and we talked about this on the podcast, it wasn't just Uber and Lyft.

It was a lot of industries. The knockdown effect was a ton of people lost their ability to be employed because the way that they word this, it's clear that basically anybody could be considered an at will or a consultant. It's a really bad initiative.

Don't believe their wording. Don't believe their lies about it. But they are coming, and they will trot out black and brown drivers to say that they need this.

And I think it's really important, because underpinning it is they are preying upon racist ideas of who deserves these protections? Who are these people? It's preying upon this lie that you can work your way up to be a billionaire, which of course is not true. You have to be born rich in America at this point to get rich. It is preying on all of these really racist tropes, and you need to really guard yourself against what they will be trotting out, because it is coming.

And by the also, I want to bring up the fact that Uber announced its first quarter that they actually had a profit. So this is not a company that is like, this is a wildly successful company. They make tons of money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

They have literally been using billionaire investor money to make sure that they can go into different cities and create as much of a monopoly as they possibly can and drive out, unfairly drive out any competition from Cabbies, any competition from Lyft, any competition from anyone else. And this is the first quarter they've ever posted a profit. They have been losing money so that they can use that money to do things like change our laws.

So don't think of them as, oh, they're a successful company. They deserve XYZ. This is not what is happening. It is an absolutely unfair playing field when you talk especially about Uber. 

Yeah, two quick things just to chime in there as very it seems to me like it's been kind of clear for a while that unstated by Uber and Lyft is that their business model is only really viable with a combination of monopolization and automation, where they eventually don't want drivers at all. Because that's the only way that they can really be successful, is having no labor costs and relying on driverless cars, which have yet to really show themselves to be safe and safe and effective as a technology.

The other thing I wanted to quickly mention, to be aware of from Uber and Lyft is one thing that they had done in California that I always think was so shady is where they would create fake organizations. Like, they created this one fake progressive organization that endorsed a bunch of Bernie Sanders backed candidates and the other progressive ballot initiatives and then said to vote yes on theirs as well. So it was basically trying to trick people by using kind of a signaling of saying, if you align with all of this, you should vote for this too.

And it was just their money. It was just kind of their own shady money behind that. And it shows you how dishonest as campaigners that they have been and will be.

Unbelievable. Because the reason billionaires are backing this stuff is it's not about Uber. They understand it's about reforming workers relationships to employees.

They understand that, and we need to understand that. Oh, yeah. On that note, I just want to point out that this information that you're hearing on this podcast is not information you're going to hear in a lot of other places.

We bring you the news as it's happening in Massachusetts every week. If you can donate to the show, if you drink a cup of coffee a week, a cup of coffee a, like, donate just a little bit to the show, you can see right below that there's a link for you to donate. We would love to have you in our wonderful pool of donors.

That would just be amazing. And it would help us so much to make sure that we can bring this to you every week. And we are reaching as many people as we possibly can.

And we have two more things to cover. So we are going to turn to Jonathan to talk about auditing the legislature. Yeah, so that kind of auditor Diana Dezaglio has a ballot initiative to kind of clarify that the state auditor has the legal authority to audit the state legislature.

That's something that's likely going to end up being a court case where Zaglia has argued that, yes, it is clear in the auditor's power to do so. Unsurprisingly legislature thinks differently. Surprise, surprise.

And so the current hope from the auditor's office is to resolve is to basically win that battle in court. But if that battle isn't successful in court, the ballot initiative becomes another way of actually winning it by law, knowing that the legislature is never going to change the law to say that they should be audited. We've seen, as we've discussed on the show, how bad the state legislature is on basic measures of transparency.

Even basic things like making the roll call votes from committees public or making anything about testimony from committee hearings public. Or sharing other records. And how Massachusetts kind of has the notoriety of being the only state where all kind of the branches of state government are fully exempt are fully exempt from the public records.

Like the governor, legislature and judiciary are fully exempt from the public records law, which means that there's just like a dearth of information about what people are actually doing and how to hold them successfully accountable. I'll just say really quickly, some of the things that I know the audit will find is everything from the way they apportion rooms to be based on favor and insidership and not open to the public, the way it's supposed to be. The fact that women are going to be paid less than men by and large in the state House, the fact that people that the staff who do most of the work are underpaid and may in some cases be violating basic minimum wage and other laws that require them to be paid certain amounts to have certain rights.

They're totally violating how many hours they're working. They're not paying interns. That's another law that I'm sure that they're breaking.

There is rampant sexual abuse, sexual assault in the state House that I'm sure that it will find. And that is without even all we're talking about, all the transparency stuff, the way the building operates is fundamentally broken from top to bottom. How laws are written, whose laws get looked at, where people are allowed to sit, whether or not they get offices, whether or not computers get fixed, whether or not they get a parking spot, which is allowed to them, like basic things.

So the auditing is what Diana Desoglio knows that from having been there, that I think the public doesn't know is that there is mechanisms of control and abuse throughout the building and the audit will put that to light and that is why they are doing everything possible to fight it. Because you cannot know what I think people who work around the building know and not understand the importance of their staff being allowed to unionize, which is again a shameful thing. They are in violation of the labor of the NLRB.

They're Democrats who are against their staff being in a union and they are fighting it like a corporation, like Walmart even, and fighting NLRB. Right. You cannot know what people know about working in the building and not understand the importance of that union, not understanding this audit.

It goes to every piece of that building. And I'm so for this ballot initiative, or at least something happening to bring to light some of these things that we know are happening, I have to just say I find it comical that there might be a ballot measure to say that the state auditor can audit the State House. I mean that literally seems so absurd that we have to have a ballot measure to say that.

It's like, oh, my God. Yeah, 42 ballot initiatives. I've been saying if you need a clear picture of how little legislating is happening, people are so disingenuous, they so don't believe that things of value can pass the State House, that there's 42 attempts outside and by comparison twelve two years ago, that's a testament to how little they're doing.

Yeah, well, we're going to wrap this up with a fun one. Jordan, walk us through the ballot. So that's the only one I got a poll on was the psychedelics.

So if you haven't seen, there are some states, Oregon and Colorado, which have allowed psychedelics to be administered to people through safe ways. And this would decriminalize psychedelics in Massachusetts, which I don't know a lot about, but I'm pretty much forced. So psilocybin mushrooms such as psilocybin mushrooms would be allowed, base aiders would be allowed to access these to treat mental health issues.

There is studies that show that they are helpful in those things. This is not my expertise, so I don't want to go too far on a limb on this, but I would say I'm interested in people being able to use plants however they wish. I think it's weird that some are legal and some aren't.

If people can do so safely, we should do so. And as always, we should put care and things in place to ensure that harm which will happen. That always happens.

When we do these things, harm always happens. We have support systems in place for people so that harm is minimized and we can maximize the benefits that people need. Yeah.

And when you say harm always happens, like harm is going to happen whether it's legal or illegal, yes, harm is happening now. Right? It's happening now. So it's not like if we pass, this harm will happen.

I would rather the harm be that we're supporting people through whatever they need because of it than currently just locking people up for no, like the criminal justice system is not the harm that should be happening. Right? What should be happening is we're supporting people as they work through whatever issues they have. That's what we should.

We don't criminalize alcoholism, nor should we. And I will also say, especially post COVID, we are in this moment where there really are just incredibly rising rates of depression and anxiety and all sorts of other issues from bipolar to all sorts of things. And I encourage people to look at some of the research on psilocybin.

I think there is real research and has been for decades because the research got shut down, but now that research is coming back. But there is some pretty interesting research about how these plants, let's call them, really can be helpful with some of these issues that are so prevalent right now. Well, my friends, that was our wrap up of some of the seven most interesting ballot initiatives that might happen that you could get involved in, and any final words on ballot measures or any ways that you think folks can get involved, stay tuned.

Encourage your state representatives to actually just vote on these issues rather than having to go to the ballot. Absolutely wonderful. Thanks so much everybody for listening and we will see you all next week.

Bye.