“Transparency in our campaign finance and election laws is vital to the health of our representative democracy,’’ former state representative Garrett J. Bradley said in a statement in June, after the House passed the measures he sponsored aimed at “closing legal loopholes that could be abused in our current laws.’’

The Hingham Democrat had been the House speaker’s designee on the Campaign Finance and Disclosure Task Force.

Just days later, amid questions from the Globe about his own political contributions, Bradley announced he was stepping down.

Now, his Thornton Law Firm faces a grand jury investigation for allegedly reimbursing partners, including Bradley, for their political donations. From 2010 through 2014, Bradley and three others donated nearly $1.6 million to Democrats and party committees; their firm then paid them $1.4 million in “bonuses,’’ many of which matched the size of their contributions, according to a review by the Globe Spotlight Team and the Center for Responsive Politics. The firm maintains it was legal because the bonuses were actually deducted from partners’ equity in the firm.

It wouldn’t be the first time a Massachusetts pol faced campaign finance scrutiny after championing reform.

Recall that former state senator Brian A. Joyce won the Common Cause Massachusetts Legislative Achievement Award for his work on the 2009 Ethics and Campaign Finance Reform Law a few years before Common Cause Massachusetts executive director Pam Wilmot joined those asking the state to investigate Joyce for violations including the use of campaign funds for his son’s graduation party.

Stephanie Ebbert

Activist touts Kerry for governor

Is John F. Kerry ready to give up the high-flying world of global diplomacy to spend his golden years worrying about Beacon Hill budget talks and breakdowns on the C branch of the Green Line?

Darlene Bryskiewicz thinks so.

Bryskiewicz, a Democratic activist and member of the Chicopee Democratic City Committee, has launched a new Twitter handle, @KerryforGov, to try to draft the outgoing secretary of state into running for governor against Charlie Baker in 2018.

“Many have contemplated who should run and who could beat Gov. Baker,’’ Bryskiewicz wrote in an e-mail. “In our eyes there is one. So that is why as we look ahead to 2018 we have turned our focus to Secretary of State John Kerry, a man with a long resume of public service who is uniquely positioned to defeat Baker and make Massachusetts a leader in clean energy, technology, and new jobs for the entire state, not just Boston.’’

She said she and other activists hope to persuade Kerry to run in the coming weeks and months.

“His leadership in Massachusetts was unmatched, and his existing organization from his time as senator, we hope, makes a run for governor more attractive and something he would entertain,’’ she wrote.

Kerry, 72, will step down as secretary of state in January.

But it’s hard to imagine him running for governor after striding across the world stage as secretary of state and running for president in 2004.

Still, he did serve on Beacon Hill as lieutenant governor under Michael S. Dukakis in the early 1980s.

Kerry, who is attending international climate meetings in Marrakech, Morocco, was not immediately available for comment.

Michael Levenson

In Maine, a new way to vote

Maine is now the first state to adopt ranked-choice voting for statewide elections, changing how the governor, state legislators, and members of Congress will be elected.

Voters approved a ballot initiative on Election Day that moved Maine to a system in which the candidates need a majority of votes to be victorious. Previously, whichever candidate received a plurality of the votes — or more than anyone else — won.

Going forward, if there are multiple candidates on the ballot and none receives 50 percent of the vote, ranked voting kicks in. Instead of simply choosing a single candidate, voters must also rank candidates from first to last. The last-place candidate is eliminated and his or her votes reallocated until a candidate receives a majority of the vote.

But constitutional questions remain.

Maine’s constitution dictates winners must be determined by “a plurality of all votes returned,’’ and local election officials must count those votes, according to a memo by Maine Attorney General Janet Mills.

Ranked-choice voting changes both of these provisions. If an election goes to round two, the secretary of state would tally — and redistribute — votes using a computer algorithm, Mills’s memo said.

Any action to address the attorney general’s concerns now falls to Maine’s Legislature, a Mills spokesman wrote in an e-mail.

Races with more than a couple of candidates are common in Maine, which has had more than two gubernatorial candidates on the ballot in every election since 1974. Of those 11 elections, only twice has a candidate received more than 50 percent of the vote.

Akilah Johnson