According to this New York Times story, Hillary Clinton, who was campaigning in Puerto Rico, said publicly that she has always felt it is indefensible that U.S. adult citizens living in Puerto Rico can’t vote in presidential general elections. See the very end of the story.
Ballot Access News
Edited By Richard Winger
How about, “It’s a territory”.
Yes, Michael is correct. The United States is a federal republic of states. That is the whole basis of the electoral college. The voters of Puerto Rico have voted against statehood, which would include the rights and privileges associated with it. Not that I am surprised that Clinton doesn’t understand that. She has never shown any appreciation for our federal system during her Washington career.
Now, is she wants to promote statehood for the island, then she can say something about voting there.
Oops, typo: that was meant to be “if she.” Sorry.
Um. They voted in favor of statehood in the last election. Congress has ignored it because they fear the island will be democratic. Despite having a republican governor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rico
Commonwealth of P.R.
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Add it to Florida or make it an independent nation.
Gee — how many leftwing socialist DONKEYS in P.R. ???
Secretary Clinton, who I don’t make a habit of agreeing with, is correct here. Citizens in territories ARE citizens, and should be allowed to vote for president and have at least one voting representative in Congress.
Overseas territories of France, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain have votes in the national elections of those countries.
The left-wing fanatics in the United States will not be satisfied until they have all the people of “color” of the world being given the right to vote in U.S. Elections. They know this will be the only way they can perpetually control the Office of President with Kennedy, Bush, Obama, and Clinton heirs controlling that office likewise perpetually.
A bit of hyperbole there, Alabama Independent. Nobody that I know of has suggested that citizens of other countries ought to be able to vote in American elections. And given how often I see you commenting on BAN, you ought to know that the Democrats (the Kennedy, Obama, and Clinton heirs you mentioned, and the Bushes are not even remotely left-wing, being Republicans) do not comprise the entire Left in America; Richard Winger has posted plenty of articles about the Green Party on here for instance.
As for the article itself, I think residents of US territories ought to be able to vote for President, seeing as they’re still quite connected to our country and would still be affected by what goes on in DC. I think the Electoral College is an outdated mechanism, but given its current continuing existence, I believe the best way to deal with this is to simply confine voting in the territories to the popular vote. It would be more of a poll in the short-term, indicating the residents’ beliefs and wishes, but in the long term the Electoral College might one day be done away with, and then their vote would have more of an impact. This is something of a compromise I suppose.
While I doubt Hillary Clinton actually cares about genuine free speech and democratic elections (in the tradition of Democratic and Republican candidates, she is completely silent about the Commission on Presidential Debates’ exclusion of relatively strong third party candidates), this is an issue that I am glad she brought up. Maybe one day voters will band together and elect some people who do care. I can dream at least…
Spain and Portugal do not have any overseas territories.
Spain has the “places of sovereignty” in North Africa- Ceuta, Melilla, and various small islands, and the Canary Islands. Portugal has Madeira and the Azores.
OBPR: Hillary is correct, and the time has come for Puerto Rican statehood, as well as for DC. Start designing those 52-star flags.
Ceuta and Melilla were kept by the Spanish because they have important military bases. Madeira and the Azores have something like commonwealth status. There’s a fourth group in addition to “stay the same”, independence, and statehood. They want to Puerto Rico to be returned to Spain.
“Territorial” status (regardless of form) was intended to be purely temporary – a transition period while an area was populated and organized. The fact that a territory doesn’t get representation nationally reflects this fact. Accordingly, the problem isn’t that “territories can’t vote”, it’s that somewhere along the line we forgot that territories are transitional.