There was a deadline last week for potential candidates in Massachusetts to tell their party they intend to seek one of the state's six constitutional offices.
But the deadline for announcing candidacy — for governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, treasurer and auditor — isn't exactly hard and fast.
Aspiring candidates can still gather delegate signatures by a later date.
Matt Murphy of the State House News Service joins us to talk about the difficulty of collecting signatures during a pandemic, and which names emerged by deadline.
Matt Murphy, State House News Service: Well, this was the deadline for candidates to inform the party that they intended to seek the nomination at the convention coming up this summer — that they wanted to get the endorsement of the party to run. This is not necessarily needed.
Candidates still have to go out and collect thousands of signatures statewide to qualify for the ballot.
If they miss this deadline, and decide they want to seek one of those six constitutional offices, they can still petition the party [PDF] to be eligible for the party nomination by getting a certain number of delegate signatures.
Signature gathering was complicated during the pandemic — during the height of the pandemic — when people weren't shopping, and people weren't going out. Some of that is a little bit back to normal.
But the names we saw informing the party were the names you would expect across all of the races. We've heard them all, with one exception.
Andrea Campbell, the former Boston city councilor and the candidate for mayor, has been said to be thinking about running for attorney general. She informed the [Democratic] party of her intent to run for the attorney general sea. That brings the race to a potential three candidates, with labor attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, and the 2018 nominee for lieutenant governor for the Democratic party, Quentin Palfrey.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: Last week, you reported some voting changes stemming from the pandemic were moving through the Legislature — mostly. The Senate passed a package of voting reforms, and then the House failed to include same-day voter registration. It's a practice used in at least 20 other states and Washington, D.C. Where was pushback coming from, and why didn't lawmakers pass it?
This was a big bone of contention as this bill moved into the House, and this is abig bill without same-day registration. This would codify voting by mail — which was very popular during the pandemic — and early voting hours and days ahead of state elections, presidential elections.
So there is a lot in this bill. But the same-day vote was really something that advocates were hoping to get after succeeding to get it into the bill in the Senate.
A lot of pushback that we heard House lawmakers talk about was coming from clerks and their ability to implement same-day registration, especially in some of these communities that have limited staff.
Interestingly, the clerks did say that they would support a more limited reform — Election Day registration, which would allow voters to show up on Election Day if they weren't registered, but eligible to register, and cast a ballot. This would limit the work the clerks had to do, because it wouldn't run through the whole early voting period, up to potentially 10 days of having to staff and administer this registration period.
But the House elected to direct the secretary of state to study this further, and these talks will now move into conference committee where Senate President Karen Spilka has said same-day registration is a big priority for her, and something she believes Massachusetts should be doing right now with no delay.
Sending a bill for study is sometimes the end of a measure. What's next in this case? Is it dead?
Yeah, it is often a way that the House or Senate can kill a bill or an amendment. The House did seem in some ways a bit more serious about this study, but we've seen them order studies on same-day registration before, and this study had no timeline on it — no direction for the secretary of state to finish this by any certain period.
It could go on for a long time. But we know Secretary Galvin is a big proponent of same-day registration. His Democratic opponent in this year's election, Tanisha Sullivan, is also a big proponent of same-day registration. So this issue is not going away.
It's very much alive in the talks between the House and Senate over a final bill, and if that should fail, I think we're going to see this continue to be a debate in the coming years.
Last week, a lawsuit was filed with the state's highest court in the hope of influencing how the millionaire's tax ballot question is summarized for voters. Any idea when the Supreme Judicial Court could issue a ruling on that?
We don't know how long the court's going to take to issue this ruling, but I would suspect it would be relatively quickly. The court has said in the past that they, like the proponents and opponents, would like to see language that the attorney general presents to voters explaining ballot questions by the beginning of February. That's obviously not going to happen.
The attorney general is saying that she would have language ready by the spring. But the court is going to want to settle this relatively quickly before that description is written and disseminated to voters.
