Court Forces Tax-Cut Referendum Off Massachusetts Ballot After Democrat Attorney General’s Misleading Summary

The commonwealth of Massachusetts, already staggering from a millionaire’s tax that voters approved in 2022 by a 52-48 percent margin, took another hit this month after the Bay State’s highest court torpedoed a ballot initiative that would have cut the state’s base income tax rate to 4 percent from the current 5 percent.

In a June 18 ruling, the state’s Supreme Judicial Court ordered the initiative kept off the state’s November ballot on the grounds that a summary prepared by the attorney general, Andrea Joy Campell, was "significantly misleading," failing to meet the state law’s requirement that the attorney general provide voters with a "fair, concise summary" of the initiative.

A June 2026 Suffolk University/Boston Globe survey of 500 Massachusetts registered voters found 66 percent support for the tax cut ballot question and 21 percent opposed, with 14 percent undecided. Supporters of the initiative had spent roughly $1.5 million to gather more than 100,000 signatures to get it on the ballot.

If it had passed, the initiative would have set Massachusetts back on a pro-growth policy course while also saving a hypothetical nurse-police officer couple roughly $2,000 a year in state taxes.

The first signer of the petition for the tax cut, Jim Stergios, told the Washington Free Beacon that he was not prepared to accuse Campbell of intentionally writing a misleading summary so that the petition was killed. Stergios, who is also the executive director of the Pioneer Institute, a free-market-oriented think tank that had endorsed the ballot initiative, noted that Campbell is a Democratic politician, and the state’s Democratic politicians overwhelmingly opposed the tax cut. "I hate imputing motive," Stergios said, "Did she do it on purpose? … I don’t have the goods."

Campbell’s office did not return requests for comment. In court, the attorney general had argued that the summary her office prepared was not misleading, but the court rejected that argument. Language in the summary suggested inaccurately that capital gains taxes would be unaffected by the cut.

Massachusetts has struggled in recent years to compete against lower-cost, lower-tax southern states and even neighboring "live free or die" New Hampshire, which does not impose a state individual income tax.

Stergios said the coalition behind the initiative would continue to pursue pro-growth reforms. "We’re going to keep fighting on this," he said. "We’re not going away."

One focus is a 2026 initiative that would cap state tax revenue growth and refund excess revenues to taxpayers. He said polls and other evidence, like website comments, indicate that voters don’t trust the government to spend money wisely. The state’s governor, Democrat Maura Healey, is up for reelection this year. Republicans will choose September 1 between Michael Minogue and Brian Shortsleeve to oppose Healey.

The state’s legislative leaders were jubilant that voters would be denied the opportunity to vote for a tax cut, according to reporting by State House News Service as quoted by 1420 WBSM, a New Bedford talk radio station. "Personally, as a resident of the Commonwealth, I am ecstatic," the state Senate president, Abby Spilka, a Democrat, said. The House Speaker, Ron Mariano, also a Democrat, declared himself "grateful that this irresponsible initiative petition won't appear on the ballot in November."

Paul D. Craney, executive director of the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, called the decision "a disgraceful outcome for Massachusetts taxpayers and a direct result of the Attorney General’s failure to do her job properly." He added, "because the Attorney General’s office produced a summary the court found to be significantly misleading, voters are being denied the chance to decide for themselves whether Massachusetts should lower its income tax."

Said Craney, "The people of Massachusetts deserved a vote on whether to lower the income tax from 5 percent to 4 percent. Instead, their voices were silenced over language written by the very office responsible for presenting ballot questions to voters. This decision should prompt serious scrutiny of the Attorney General’s role in the ballot process, because no future campaign should have its question thrown off the ballot due to mistakes outside the proponents’ control."

A spokesman for the Mass Opportunity Alliance, Colin Reed, said his group "is here for the long-haul." He said, "The coalition is dedicated to making the Commonwealth more competitive, and lower taxes are crucial to those efforts."

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