A week after suing the top Democrats in the Massachusetts Legislature, state Auditor Diana DiZoglio announced Tuesday that she’s officially running for reelection.
The Methuen Democrat said in a social media post that she wants to “continue working to increase transparency & accountability across government” in a second term.
DiZoglio was elected auditor in 2022 after serving a combined decade in the state House and Senate. As a lawmaker, DiZoglio was an outspoken critic of Beacon Hill’s lack of transparency and top-down power structure, and she continued that theme in her first statewide campaign by pledging to conduct an audit of the state Legislature. Her attempts to carry out that promise have become her signature issue as auditor.
When DiZoglio took office in 2023 and attempted to launch her audit, leaders in the House and Senate refused to comply. Their position, later backed up by Attorney General Andrea Campbell, was that the auditor’s office did not have the authority to pry open the books of an independent branch of state government.
DiZoglio went to the ballot in 2024, asking voters to expressly grant her the power to audit the Massachusetts House and Senate. That ballot question won with 72% of the vote.
Fifteen months later, House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka have maintained that the audit would violate the separation of powers laid out in the state Constitution, and Campbell has declined to represent DiZoglio in taking the matter to court.
DiZoglio last week filed a lawsuit with the state’s highest court seeking both to compel Mariano and Spilka to turn over documents and to be allowed to bring on an outside attorney to represent her office. Campbell has said DiZoglio did not have the authority to file that suit.
In addition to DiZoglio’s reelection bid, the legislative audit and its fallout are spilling over into other races this year. DiZoglio is also backing another ballot question that would extend the state’s public records law to cover the Legislature and the governor’s office, and several Republican candidates have seized on the stalled audit as a campaign issue.
DiZoglio said last week that she sees it as a nonpartisan issue.
“The people of Massachusetts, Democrat and Republican, agree that they want more transparency and accountability out of their state government,” she told reporters.
