Massachusetts just held a primary in which unenrolled voters had to pick a party’s ballot and enrolled voters were locked into their own. Question 3 would abolish that system entirely.
Every candidate for an office would appear on one ballot. Every voter would get the same ballot. The top two finishers, regardless of party, would be the only names printed in November.
It would not take effect until January 1, 2028. Nothing about the 2026 elections changes either way.
The Attorney General’s summary, verbatim
“This proposed law would eliminate political party primaries for state elections and instead establish a system where there would be a single, all-party primary in which all candidates, regardless of their party affiliation, would be listed on one ballot, and voters could vote for any candidate on the ballot. The two candidates receiving the most votes in the primary would advance to the general election ballot.
This proposed law would require candidates for governor and lieutenant governor to run and be listed jointly on the ballot in the primary.
This proposed law would provide political party status to any group whose candidates for any statewide office received at least 3% of the ballots cast in the state primary.”
What your vote does
A YES vote abolishes party primaries. One September ballot lists every candidate for each office, open to every voter regardless of enrollment. The top two advance.
A NO vote keeps what we have: separate Democratic and Republican primaries, with unenrolled voters choosing one party’s ballot, and independent or minor-party candidates skipping the primary and filing directly for November.
It covers Congress, despite the name
The petition is titled “all-party state primaries,” which reads as though federal offices are excluded. They are not, and this is the detail most people get wrong.
The new provision, G.L. c. 50 § 2A, applies to primaries held under G.L. c. 53 § 41. That section covers “all offices to be filled at a state election, except presidential elector.” And G.L. c. 50 § 1 defines “State officer” to “include United States senator and representative in Congress.”
Covered: Governor and Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Secretary, Treasurer, Auditor, Governor’s Council, the Legislature, U.S. Senate and U.S. House, and county offices including district attorney and sheriff.
Not covered: the presidential primary, which lives in a separate part of the statute and is untouched.
What happens to the parties
The measure runs nineteen sections, and the mechanics matter.
Party primaries end outright. Section 10 strips out the machinery by which a voter requests a particular party’s ballot. The enrollment-based ballot choice simply disappears.
Party status gets re-based. The 3 percent threshold for official party status moves from the state election to the state primary. The alternative path, enrolling 1 percent of registered voters, survives.
Endorsements survive as printed text. The ballot header becomes “Official primary ballot” rather than naming a party. On the joint request of a party’s committee and the candidate, the words “Endorsed by the [party]” print next to the name, filed at least 15 days before the printing deadline.
The convention route disappears. Sections 4 and 5 strike the path by which a candidate reaches the ballot with 15 percent of convention delegates. Everyone gets on by nomination papers, with the same signature requirement.
A candidate’s party label comes from their own voter registration, not from the nomination they seek. And signers of nomination papers no longer have to be unenrolled or in the candidate’s party.
Ties are broken by coin flip
This deserves its own line. Section 15 rewrites the tie-breaking provision so that where candidates tie for the final advancing slot, the Secretary summons them and “shall at that time and place break the tie by lot.”
Under the current system a coin flip decides a party’s nominee. Under Question 3 it would decide who appears on the November ballot at all. There is no runoff and no ranked ballot.
The SJC upheld it, and one footnote explains why
In Jackson v. Attorney General, SJC-13904, decided June 22, 2026, two Democratic State Committee members argued the petition violated the freedom of elections guaranteed by Article 9 of the Declaration of Rights. The Court disagreed, holding the measure “does not significantly interfere with the constitutionally protected right to vote” and bears “a real and substantial relation to legitimate State interests.”
The most revealing part is footnote 11. The Attorney General declined to certify a companion petition identical to this one except that it lacked a write-in option, finding that version inconsistent with freedom of elections. The write-in space on the November ballot is what saved this measure. That is why the certified petition is labeled “Version B.”
The Court also disclaimed any view on the merits: “Our task is not to determine whether the proposal at issue is better or worse than the current system.” And because the plaintiffs never raised a single-subject challenge, that theory was never tested and is now time-barred.
Who is paying for it
The Coalition for Healthy Democracy 2026 reported $2,198,752.04 raised and $2,081,795.77 spent as of December 31, 2025, with $116,956 left. Its largest single expenditure was $1,205,000 to a signature-gathering firm.
Two caveats before the donor list. That committee supports both Question 1 and Question 3, so the total cannot be attributed to this question alone. And every figure here stops at the end of 2025. The next filing is due September 4, 2026, covering nine months of the most intense spending.
The money comes from private equity and venture capital:
- David Randolph Peeler, Berkshire Partners, $550,000
- Andrew Balson, Cove Hill Partners, $290,000
- Mark Nunnelly, $250,000
- Brian Conway, TA Associates, $200,000
- Jennifer Waldron, $150,000
- Frank Laukien of Bruker and Dwight Poler, $100,000 each
- Six donors at $50,000, from Summit Partners, Charlesbank, Berkshire Partners, and Harvard Business School
Roughly 120 donors in all. Danielle Allen, the lead petitioner, gave $20,030. Honorary co-chairs are Kerry Healey and Joe Kennedy III.
Readers of our primary money coverage may recognize the top name. Peeler also gave $250,000 to Advance Progress, the super PAC that spent $5.6 million against Ed Markey.
The opposition, Voter Rights MA, has filed no reports and disclosed nothing. Its coalition includes the state Democratic Party, the AFL-CIO, AFT Massachusetts, several SEIU locals, and Progressive Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Republican Party opposes the measure but is not part of it.
Checking the opposition’s own numbers
Voter Rights MA makes three claims about the money. Against the filings:
The $2,198,752.04 total is exact. The claim that 97 percent came from gifts over $10,000 is very close: the actual figure is 96.9 percent. The claim that seven donors gave $1.5 million is correct only if you consolidate duplicate filings, which OCPF lists separately, and doing so makes the concentration worse rather than better.
One part of the framing does not hold. The opposition describes the funders as “crypto, AI, and hedge fund billionaires.” They are private equity and venture capital. And the national open-primaries organizations often named in these fights, including Arnold Ventures and Open Primaries, appear nowhere in the filings. Unite America appears once, at $15,000 in 2024, to a predecessor committee.
What actually happened in California and Washington
Two states have run top-two primaries long enough to study, and the research is not what either campaign will tell you.
The moderation claim is weakly supported
The central argument for top-two is that it elects moderates. The peer-reviewed literature mostly finds it does not.
McGhee, Masket, Shor, Rogers and McCarty concluded in the American Journal of Political Science in 2014 that “the openness of a primary election has little, if any, effect on the extremism of the politicians it produces.” A statewide experiment by Ahler, Citrin and Lenz found voters “failed to distinguish moderate and extreme candidates.” Kousser, Phillips and Shor found in 2018 that the reforms “did not bring their hoped-for effects.”
Two studies dissent, in 2020 and 2024. And there is a serious methodological problem: California adopted top-two, independent redistricting, and a term-limits change essentially at once, so the state cannot cleanly separate the effects. Washington is the cleaner test, and Washington shows the weakest evidence.
The failure mode is vote-splitting
In California’s 31st district in 2012, four Democrats split the vote and two Republicans advanced in a district Obama had carried with 57 percent. The leading Democrat missed the runoff by roughly a thousand votes. Two years later, in the same district, the second Republican missed by under two hundred.
Washington’s 2016 Treasurer race is the better analogue for a one-party state. Three Democrats split the vote and two Republicans advanced with 23 and 25 percent, guaranteeing a Republican would win statewide office in a Democratic state.
It runs both directions. In a California Senate district in 2022, about 60 percent of voters chose one of six Republicans, and two Democrats advanced.
Strategic gaming became routine. A super PAC supporting Adam Schiff spent millions in 2024 boosting a Republican specifically to keep a stronger Democrat out of the runoff.
Minor parties fare badly
Third-party and independent candidates made the top two in a small fraction of California races. In 2016, just two of fifty advanced, and both were running against an otherwise unopposed Democrat.
Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin, while formally neutral, warned in August that the measure could “wipe out third parties completely,” since minor parties currently gain and keep ballot status through thresholds this measure changes. He also said the ballot language presents “multiple questions all wrapped into one.”
But it is not unpopular where it operates
California likely voters have consistently called it “mostly a good thing,” at 59 percent in 2012 and again in May 2026, peaking at 68 percent in 2024.
Two notes cut the other way. Abel Maldonado, who authored California’s version, told the Los Angeles Times in June 2026 that it should be scrapped. Louisiana reverted to party primaries for federal races in 2024, and Colorado, Arizona, Montana and South Dakota all rejected similar measures in 2024.
Where the polling stands
A UMass Amherst and WCVB poll of 800 registered voters, fielded August 5 to 12 with a margin of 4.4 points, found 51 percent yes and 32 percent no.
The softness is the story. Only 20 percent are firmly yes, against 19 percent firmly no, with 17 percent undecided. Poll co-director Ray La Raja: the measure “starts with a lead, but this race is far from over.”
One rule that applies to every question
An initiative law passes only if it wins a majority and is approved by voters equal to at least 30 percent of all ballots cast in the election. With nine questions on this ballot and predictable drop-off toward the bottom, a question can win its head-to-head and still fail.
All seven of the new questions are ordinary statutes, not constitutional amendments, which means the Legislature can amend or repeal any of them immediately after passage with a simple majority.
Common questions
Would Question 3 apply to congressional races?
Yes. Massachusetts law defines “State officer” to include United States senator and representative, and the primary statute covers all offices filled at a state election except presidential elector. The presidential primary is separate and unaffected.
When would it take effect?
January 1, 2028. The first all-party primary would be September 2028. It has no effect on the 2026 elections.
What happens to party endorsements?
They survive as printed text. On the joint request of the party committee and the candidate, “Endorsed by the [party]” appears next to the name on the ballot.
Could two candidates from the same party face each other in November?
Yes, and that is a routine outcome where top-two operates. It also produces the reverse: a party that splits its vote among too many candidates can be shut out of the general election entirely.
Who is funding it?
The supporting committee reported $2.2 million through December 2025, overwhelmingly from private equity and venture capital individuals. The opposition has disclosed nothing. Updated figures are due September 4, 2026.
Petition text and the Attorney General’s summary from House No. 5003 and the certified Initiative Petition 25-12. Campaign finance from OCPF filings covering activity through December 31, 2025. Polling from UMass Amherst and WCVB, fielded August 5 to 12, 2026. The official ballot title and the one-sentence yes and no statements required by G.L. c. 54 § 53 will appear in the Secretary’s voter guide in September and are not quoted here. General information, not legal advice.