In rejecting all-party primaries ballot question, Mass. voters (again) said they like how they vote

Résumé détaillé

Question 3 would have eliminated partisan primaries in state elections, replacing the state’s current system with one that lists all candidates on a single ballot. The question failed.

Despite complaints about the lack of competitiveness and poor timing of Massachusetts elections, voters don’t seem to want to change them.

For the second time in six years, one of the state’s most heavily contested ballot questions offered voters a dramatically different way to pick their elected officials in a state that often offers few options on Election Day.

Voters this month rejected Question 3, which would have eliminated partisan primaries in state elections and replaced them with a system in which all candidates, regardless of party, would appear on a single ballot.

People are naturally “looking for a justification to stick with the status quo,” said Jesse Rhodes, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-director of the UMass Poll.

“It’s reasonable to stick with the devil you know than the one that you don’t,” he said.

The vote had echoes of 2020, when a very different, but similarly disruptive, proposal to implement ranked-choice voting in Massachusetts was also rejected. Like the backers of Question 3, advocates for ranked-choice voting argued a change in system could prod candidates to appeal to a broader set of voters beyond their base.

The ranked-choice proposal, however, was largely dogged by questions about the system’s complexity and its timing, asking voters to embrace drastic change during the depths of a pandemic already rife with it.

This year’s measure to create all-party primaries was more straightforward, and those who voted on the question were not necessarily divided by political leaning or ideology. Instead, they were united by the idea that a more complicated system could lead to complicated results — a concept voters struggle with generally, said political scientists who study voter behavior.

Ultimately, fewer than 40 percent of voters backed it, and the question won in just one town, Petersham.

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