The People’s House Campaign

The MA State House is broken, with your help we made it better.

The Massachusetts State House is one of the least transparent in the country. From backroom deals, to private votes, and an ever-increasing concentration of power, our democracy is in crisis. Bay Staters deserve a government that centers their voices – not one that bends over backwards to keep them out.

Together, we made the State House a little bit closer to a People’s House.

The Problem:

A legislature that de-centers and devalues constituent voices

Year after year, widely popular legislation that would improve the lives of millions is delayed in the State House, made less ambitious, or killed behind closed doors.
With the least competitive elections in the country, an immense concentration of power into the hands of legislative leadership, and one of the least transparent state houses in the country, Beacon Hill has become unaccountable to the people
Instead, our government, time and time again, prioritizes the agendas of corporate lobbyists and special interests.

Learn more about the need for State House reform.

Our Solution:

How we built grassroots power to fix the broken Rules

Step one: Organize thousands of everyday people across the commonwealth to demand their legislator support pro-democracy amendments to the House and Joint Rules.
Step two: Provide every District Team of constituents the skills and resources they need to effectively lobby their legislators to support these pro-democracy state house reforms.
Step three: Escalate pressure alongside the District Teams to ensure this issue is one that the state house leadership can’t ignore. After all, our democracy is on the line.

Our 2023 priority: Public Committee Votes

The Legislature starts every new session by writing their own rulebook. The legislature usually adopts anti-transparent rules that deliberately exclude the public from participating in the lawmaking process. Most importantly, until this campaign the House and Joint rules did not require that votes taken in legislative committees be made public. This was disastrous for democracy; how can we hold our legislators accountable when we can’t see how they’re voting? Read more about why making public committee votes is so crucial.

Our aim was the adoption of an amendment to make all committee votes public. This is an exceptionally popular piece of legislation: since 2020, our non-binding ballot question for public committee votes received an average of 87% approval among the electorate. Despite an overwhelming electoral mandate for public committee votes, the legislature refused to show us how they vote. The People’s House Campaign was designed to overwhelm the legislature with pressure so that the 2025 joint rules would change this, and it was successful! Committee votes are now public, so legislators can no longer kill popular bills through a backroom, hidden vote while pretending to support them.

History behind the campaign

In November of 2020, Act on Mass launched the Transparency is Power campaign. In April, we joined in coalition with Sunrise Boston, Mijente Boston Asamblea, Indivisible Mass, and Our Climate to form The People’s House. Between November and July, over 4000 constituents in all 160 districts across the state and over 60 advocacy organizations joined our movement for a more transparent state house. We organized and built momentum in anticipation of the 2023 Rules debates in the House. While our three amendments were voted down in that cycle, we did secure some key concessions, namely that “no” votes in Joint and House committees would be available online. We successfully changed the landscape of this issue here in Massachusetts. This partial victory was a huge step towards a State House that is transparent, accessible, and accountable to the people. It laid the groundwork for our victory in 2025. Together, we secured a more transparent house, but the house is still unproductive, the speaker still has too much power, and there is still much work to be done.