The Massachusetts Ballot Questions You Won’t See This November

Nine questions (the most since 1994) made it onto the Massachusetts ballot this November. Whether or not to repeal the newest gun law, making cannabis illegal again, land zoning rule changes for new home builds in order to mitigate the housing crisis -but almost as interesting is what didn't make the cut.

Sales Tax, Income Tax & Gas Tax

Start with taxes. Three separate tax cut proposals were floating around this year. One would have knocked the state income tax down from 5 percent to 4 percent over three years. Another would have cut the sales tax from 6.25 percent down to 5 percent. A third wanted to phase out the gas tax completely. None of them made it to your ballot.

I came upon a man gathering signatures outside of the local Big Y in Pittsfield a couple of months ago for the income tax reduction question.

The income tax cut is the one with the wildest story behind it. It actually collected enough signatures to move forward! But the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court stepped in this past June and ruled that the official ballot summary, the one written by the Attorney General's office, was misleading to voters. So the court pulled the plug before it ever got close to a vote. That means this measure didn't fail because people didn't want it. It failed because of a legal fight over how it would have been described on the ballot itself. -ballotpedia.com

The gas tax and sales tax proposals had a simpler problem. They just didn't collect enough valid signatures to qualify.

Voter ID

One more that fell short might surprise you. A push to require voter ID in Massachusetts never made the ballot either, along with a related idea to make the state's voter database public. Both came up short on signatures too. 13 other states besides Massachusetts do not require ID to vote.

The Trump administration has made a federal push to pass the SAVE ACT where you'd need proof if citizenship to register to vote, not just ID when you vote.