Recently I was handed a Register of Probate nomination paper. And on the nomination paper, there was a field for “Party” and, on the form, the nominee declared the political party that they’re running for.

As somebody who is a newbie to Massachusetts (and to the States), this is such an odd concept. Basically, we are talking here about a senior civic administrative role. Somebody who processes wills and estates. Why would you need to be running for a particular political party to do this job? Who cares if you’re a Dem, a Republican or an Independent? In fact, why are we holding elections for this role at all? Why wouldn’t this role be filled with an application and interview, an open contest, like any other job? It all seemed rather strange, and rather foreign.

So obviously, I had to dig in.

First of all, the role of Register of Probate. Yes, the responsibilities seem to be almost entirely administrative: processing filings, managing case flow, certifying documents, helping the public understand filing requirements. Does it have any judicial authority which might warrant the partisan aspect? Not as far as I could tell. The judges make the actual decisions; the Register keeps the wheels turning. Assistant registers can handle some uncontested matters, but that's about as close to "judicial authority" as it gets.

It was also mentioned to me in passing that the nominee was running uncontested (so far - deadline doesn’t close until May 2026). And, wait for it, this is pretty much the norm.

Being from Ireland, I found it hard to get my head around this casual ‘uncontested’ status. Ireland uses proportional representation with multi-seat constituencies — each area elects several TDs at once, and voters rank candidates — which means parties almost always run more candidates than there are seats, and independents pile in on top. While it is constitutionally legal for an Irish election to go unchallenged, it is effectively non-existent in modern times. In Ireland the last several election cycles, 100% of local council seats were contested, meaning every "job" at that level required a public vote. Also, administrative roles like this one are not elected by the people.

So I was so bemused and curious by this entire situation that I had to learn more.

It seems the push to elect representatives into these roles was to improve democracy (which is kind of ironic, you'll see why in a minute).

The origins go back to the 1700s - the Register of Deeds became an elected position in 1715, when the Massachusetts colonial legislature enacted a law moving record-keeping from County Court Clerks to elected representatives. The Hampden County Registry states: “Until 1715 the Clerks of the County Courts maintained the public records. At that time a law was enacted calling for the election of Registers of Deeds to represent the people of their district.”

(Why 1715? At the time, Massachusetts was a royal colony and the Crown-appointed governor controlled most official appointments. By making Registers of Deeds elected, the colonial legislature was taking an important job - who keeps the land records - out of the governor's hands.[1])

Sheriffs, Registers of Probate, Clerks of Courts, and District Attorneys (DAs are arguably different — they make real policy decisions about who gets prosecuted and how — but they were packaged together in the same reform) all became elected positions at the same time - May 23, 1855 - under Article XIX of the Massachusetts Articles of Amendment. Before this, all four of these roles were appointed by the governor. Article XIX was part of a package of six constitutional amendments adopted by the 1854 and 1855 legislatures and approved by voters, all coming out of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1853. The convention was driven by a Democratic-Free Soil coalition (the Free Soilers were a short-lived anti-slavery party that allied with Democrats in the 1850s) that wanted to shift power from the governor’s office to voters. The same package also made several other state offices popularly elected and reformed the Governor’s Council. (Mass.gov: Researching the History of Amendments to the Massachusetts Constitution)

Massachusetts wasn’t acting alone here; this was a nationwide movement. The shift from appointed to elected local officials swept across the United States from the 1830s through the 1860s, driven by the Jacksonian movement — a political push, named after President Andrew Jackson, to take power away from political appointees and give more decisions directly to voters — and growing concerns about patronage abuse under appointment systems. Mississippi led the way in 1832, becoming the first state where all judges were popularly elected. New York’s Constitutional Convention of 1846 established elected sheriffs, district attorneys, county clerks, coroners, and registers. Wisconsin (1847-48), Illinois (1848), and California (1849) all followed with similar reforms. By the time Massachusetts adopted its 1855 amendments, it was joining an established national pattern. (Michael J. Ellis, “The Origins of the Elected Prosecutor,” Yale Law Journal, Vol. 121, p. 1528 (2012))

Massachusetts’s insistence on partisan elections for administrative roles is not universal, even within the US. Nationally, only 61% of local elected officials hold partisan positions; 39% are non-partisan. (Bipartisan Policy Center: The Dangers of Partisan Incentives for Election Officials) (Wikipedia: Recorder of Deeds) Maine has shifted some Register of Deeds positions to appointed roles, with proponents citing “more stability in the office” and freedom from “the fluctuations of election cycles.” (Town Line: It’s time to change Somerset’s register of deeds to an appointed position)

So 1855 was a deliberate decision to take appointment power away from the governor and give it to voters. The irony is that 170 years later, those elections have become so uncontested that you could argue the positions have become effectively self-appointing again.

The more I get to know about Massachusetts politics, the less of a surprise this is…but one of the strangest wrinkles in this story: Massachusetts technically abolished most of its county governments between 1997 and 2000, but kept all the elected county positions. Over those years, eight of the fourteen county governments were dissolved after a series of fiscal crises. Governor William Weld said upon signing the dissolution: “Counties have become obsolete, inward-looking bureaucracies with dozens of departments and department heads that serve themselves and not the taxpayer.” (Boston.com: Massachusetts county governments abolished)

Hmm, no comment!

But every elected county office survived. You could say the positions exist in a structural vacuum: partisan elections for jobs that really have no partisan policy dimension, in government entities that were declared obsolete decades ago.

Take Franklin County. It abolished its own county government in 1997. But they kept the elected Register of Probate. And the state had already taken over funding the courts back in 1978. So we have nominees running for elected county positions in a county that hasn't had a county government for nearly 30 years, for a court that's been state-funded for nearly 50 years, in a partisan election for a job that requires zero partisan ideology.

Make it make sense.

So I mentioned at the top of the blog that the local Register of Probate election was going unchallenged.

This is what I found: 11 out of 14 Registers of Probate are Democrats. 2 are Republicans (Barnstable and Worcester). Most run unopposed.

The standout stories:

The winner by a county mile seems to be in Essex. Pamela Casey O'Brien in Essex County has held the job since 1996 — nearly 30 years. She didn't face any opposition from 1996 until 2014 (18 years!), when a Republican finally ran against her. She won 59-41%. In 2020, she was back unopposed with 98.3% of the vote. (Massachusetts Election Statistics: Essex Register of Probate 2020)

John Merrigan in Franklin County has won a whopping four consecutive 6-year terms (24 years total) without an election opponent. Not one opponent. (Greenfield Recorder: Merrigan seeks fourth term)

Contested elections seem to be rare. Only 4 of 14 counties had genuinely contested races in their most recent election (Bristol, Hampden, Suffolk, and Worcester) — and two of those were special elections filling vacancies. The rest were either completely unopposed or won with 98-99% of the vote. (Massachusetts Election Statistics)

The next election for all 14 counties is this year, so I’ll return to the topic once the nomination deadline has passed and take a look at the stats.

Stephanie Fattman in Worcester County caused an upset when she defeated the incumbent Stephen Abraham 52-48%. Fattman was 26 years old and still in law school at the time. She's a Republican, one of only two across the state. She then won again in 2020 against a challenger, 54-46%. (Worcester Telegram: Fattman defeats Abraham)

When you dig into the story of 2014, it seems the State Auditor found that a top aide in Stephen Abraham’s office was teaching at three colleges during work hours and not doing his actual job, and about $3,500 in filing fees had gone missing. Fattman ran specifically on the issue of mismanagement. So this wasn't as random as it looks on paper: the incumbent had documented problems and someone showed up to challenge him on it. (Mass.gov: Office of the State Auditor — Worcester County Probate & Family Court audit)

Another outlier story is Norfolk County in 2020. The incumbent, Patrick McDermott, retired after 18 years to run for Norfolk County Sheriff. Open seat, big county — and five attorneys with probate experience all jumped in. The 2020 Democratic primary was a genuine five-way race, and the winner, Colleen Brierley, took it with just 27.6% of the vote. Then no Republican ran in the general. (Quick note for anyone unfamiliar with the American system: a "primary" is an internal party election to pick the party's candidate, and the "general" election is where all the parties' winners face each other. In lopsided one-party areas, whoever wins the Democratic primary basically wins the seat outright — so the primary is the real contest.) In this case, the entire election was decided by a small number of primary voters. (Massachusetts Election Statistics: Norfolk Register of Probate 2020 Democratic Primary)

In Worcester, it took an auditor's report and documented misconduct to shake a challenger loose. In Norfolk, it took the incumbent literally retiring and walking out the door.

Now I’ve not got a vendetta against the poor Register of Probate people, I swear! I just happened to see the nomination paper for this position.

Unsurprisingly, the pattern is pretty much the same across all the other local roles in MA.

In 2024, in Berkshire County alone, the Clerk of Courts, both Registers of Deeds (Central and Northern Berkshire), and all Franklin County offices were uncontested — Democrats were the only candidates. In Egremont, the entire town election had zero contested races. Mayoral races in Agawam, Chicopee, Holyoke, and Leominster all went uncontested too. Franklin County’s county offices followed the same pattern — Democrats were the only candidates. (Berkshire Eagle: Election Day results)

A big part of the problem is that finding out information even about who is running is hard. I can see this for the elections in 2026, you have to root around even just to find who is running in your own locality. If I were the conspiracy-minded type, I'd start wondering whether this is a feature rather than a bug."

And we don't have a complete state-level breakdown by role because there's no central database of who holds what across all 351 MA cities and towns. Interestingly, a campaign consultant, Elaine Almquist, had to create a "Local Election Transparency Project" with Boston University just to start filling that gap. She summed it up nicely when she said: "It’s driven by a lack of readily available information on some city or town websites detailing who is running for which position on the ballot and when residents can vote”...“It’s chicken and egg. People don’t know about them, they don’t run, and when they’re not competitive, people don’t vote.” (MASSterList: Beacon Hill isn't the only place with a lack of competition — city and town halls see it too)

It’s really, really hard to say with just data alone (I could find very little). There’s strong evidence that the state-level party structure makes it very difficult for primary challengers to gain traction — between fundraising advantages, leadership endorsements, and the sheer difficulty of unseating an incumbent — so you could infer that something similar trickles down to county races. But anecdotally, that’s not what it looks like.

I can see signature drives being organized around MA counties for the 2026 nominations at local levels, but that looks more like the nominees self-organizing, rather than any party-based mechanics in action, (Signature drive is essentially a one-stop event where Democratic town committees have nomination papers for everyone running on the Democratic ballot. So voters go in and are ushered around the tables to sign each nominee’s paper, one after the next.) I do hear anecdotally of candidates paying for their own promotional material and signage. And I can see on the Office of Campaign and Political Finance (OCPF) — the state body that publishes every campaign contribution — that candidates rely on small, singular donations.

My honest view: the Democratic party machine at this level doesn't seem to be out there crushing challengers with money and endorsements. Nor are they showering nominees with funding. Which makes the whole thing stranger, not less strange. So why do so few of these races get contested? I don't have a clean answer. Maybe the social cost of challenging a fellow Democrat in a small political world is higher than the reward of winning. Maybe the 'machine' is really just inertia plus social norms. Or maybe, in a state that leans this heavily Democratic, the local network on the ground just quietly rallies around one candidate and everyone else gets the memo. I'm inferring here, not citing — but that's where I've landed. There are local structures that have been in place for years here, and likely function like clockwork without question.

Not at the races up to now really. It's worth noting that Charlie Baker, Republican governor from 2015 to 2023 and one of the most popular governors in the country, spent eight years in office without doing much to build the MA Republican Party — so the bench has stayed thin (Boston Globe: With Mass. GOP in trouble, Baker pledges help to like-minded candidates)

More Republicans may run in 2026; we’ll have to take a look at the final tally of nominees.

There is the outlier Fattman, of course. Incidentally, she got outside money for her campaign — not from the GOP, but family in Sutton funneled more than $50,000 through the Sutton Republican Town Committee — basically, the local chapter of the Republican Party at the town level — to support her, including a $10,050 billboard in Worcester. Across multiple cycles, the Sutton RTC made roughly $82,000 in in-kind donations (contributions made as goods or services rather than cash — think a free billboard instead of a cheque for the same amount) to her campaigns, funded largely by members of the Mass Fiscal Alliance, a conservative-leaning advocacy group. This arrangement later triggered an OCPF investigation and a 2023 settlement with the Massachusetts Attorney General for illegal campaign contributions. (Boston Globe: Fattman campaign finance settlement) (Mass.gov: AG settlement announcement)

It feels like there isn’t.

Rep. Susannah Whipps of the 2nd Franklin District is the sole independent in the Massachusetts legislature. She was originally elected as a Republican in 2014, then switched to unenrolled/independent status in August 2017 because she believed it would help her work with both parties. She is now serving her sixth term and is a co-owner of Whipps, Inc., a stainless steel equipment manufacturer in Athol. She is another outlier. (Ballotpedia: Susannah Whipps) (WWLP: Rep. Susannah Whipps leaving Republican Party, becoming unenrolled)

When there's only one independent in the entire 200-member legislature, 'outlier' might be underselling it!

I think the topic of non-party candidates deserves a blog of its own, so I’ll come back to it.

Maryland, which is also lopsidedly Democratic, shows the same pattern as Massachusetts. Some Register of Wills races contested, most not. That's consistent with the "heavy one-party state" theory. (WMAR2: Already winners in 2026 Maryland elections)

Pennsylvania and Michigan, both competitive two-party states, do have more contested county administrative races than MA or MD, but not dramatically more. Michigan's clerk/treasurer races were still around 94% uncontested even with a genuinely competitive state electorate. Pennsylvania had visible contests in Lancaster County and some others, but it's not like they're all being fought over. (LancasterOnline: GOP wins register of wills races) (Michigan Chronicle: Wayne County 2024 results)

According to Ballotpedia's 2024 analysis, 93.8% of all county clerk and treasurer races across the United States were uncontested. That's 2,688 races, nationwide, and fewer than 7% of them had more than one candidate. (Ballotpedia: Analysis of uncontested elections, 2024)

So it seems the good news is that MA is not alone is this strange pattern of holding elections that nobody runs in.

It's notable that we've inherited this structure from the 1850s, an era that cared passionately about electing local officials and pulling power away from the governor.

I realize that all of this probably looks fairly benign at the ground level. A qualified person steps up to do the job. They get the required signatures, nobody challenges them, they win, and the world quietly keeps on turning. And there's an honest case for that being fine. Maine has already shifted some of these roles to appointments precisely because stability and competence matter more than competition for a job like this. You could argue voters are being perfectly rational — why pay attention to who runs the Probate filing system? — and the real problem isn't the lack of competition but the fact that we're using elections for jobs that don't need them.

But here's the thing. Remember the Worcester story from earlier — the one where it took a State Auditor's report to reveal that a top aide was teaching at three colleges during work hours? That's what can happen in a system where the only accountability mechanism is an election that nobody's running in. And from the patterns here, you pretty much need a 'D' next to your name on the ballot to get one of these roles.

If we are going to bother holding an election for a role, we should have an environment that both encourages and cultivates healthy competition and fresh thinking.

Even if you vote Democrat, these patterns should worry you. Healthy debate is important for democracy. And if there is no debate happening, or the only debate is between those who all have the same ideology, it’s hard to see anything but malaise and group think eventually set in.

And the research backs this up: competition improves accountability. It's not a subtle effect, either. Research from other contexts suggests the pattern is real — a study published in the American Economic Review found that mayors facing competitive reelection misappropriate 27% fewer resources, the mechanism being that the threat of losing keeps people honest. That specific dynamic obviously can't work when nobody's running against you. (American Economic Association: Electoral Accountability and Corruption) The Journal of Politics found that when voters perceive corruption as constant across candidates, they tend to overlook it — creating a feedback loop where a lack of competition normalises poor governance. (Journal of Politics: Corruption as the Only Option) MassINC has documented that Massachusetts consistently ranks last on electoral competitiveness, directly linking this to governance problems. (MassINC: Massachusetts government is stubbornly unrepresentative) And Stanford's Andrew Hall has shown that state legislative elections drive ideological extremism when 80% of general elections aren't competitive. (Stanford SIEPR: The roots of legislative polarization)

Incidentally, and this is me leaning on an old idea, not a new one — the social psychologist Irving Janis coined the term 'groupthink' in 1972 [2] to describe what happens inside closed, homogeneous decision-making groups: self-censorship creeps in, silence gets mistaken for consent, and outsiders start looking suspicious to everyone on the inside. You don't have to squint very hard to see that pattern in a system where almost nobody ever runs against anyone.

I don't think the people filling these jobs are bad at them. Far from it. That's not the point. The point is that when we hold elections, with ballots and nomination papers and campaign signs and primary dates, but no actual election ever happens, we've kept the shape of democracy and quietly let the point of it all drain out. Whether that means making these positions appointed (as Maine has started doing), switching to non-partisan elections (as 39% of local jurisdictions nationally already do), or something else entirely — I don't know yet. And I'm not sure the fix, whatever it is, will come from inside a system that's this comfortable with itself.

I'll come back to this after the May nomination deadline. I'm curious what the 2026 picture will look like on the ground.

^{[1]: No single source directly attributes the 1715 law to governor-legislature conflicts of the period, but the political context is well documented.}

^{[2] Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, Houghton Mifflin, 1972.}