On June 11, Puerto Rico votes on its future political status. During April, the Puerto Rico government added a third option, for maintaining the status quo, Commonwealth status. Originally the vote was only going to include the choice of statehood, or independence.
The Governor and Speaker of the Puerto Rico House of Representatives both strongly favor statehood. According to this story, the U.S. Justice Department required Puerto Rico to add the choice to maintain commonwealth status. Also see this story.
Here is a copy of the June 11 ballot.
The balloting is less than a week yet the actual ballots can be changed because DOJ says it must be? How does this impact all of the state “defenses” that less than 45 days prevents altering ballots because of need to get ballots to absentee voters in the military? (Puerto Ricans are US citizens and many serve in the U.S. military/naval forces.) Will this set a precedent to refute the “too late” argument against 3rd party and independent court victories?
That’s an excellent point, Gene.
With more than two choices on a referendum question, perhaps they should use ranked voting.
The ballot change appears to have been ordered in April (I believe the 13th, with proofs of ballots due by the 20th). 45 days from April 20 would be June 4. It appears that Puerto Rico would be able to comply with the 45-day requirement.
The Puerto Rico legislature, which is dominated by the pro-Statehood party, had to rush the amendments required by the USDOJ to qualify for federal funding under a federal law approved in 2014.
This imposition by the USDOJ only goes to prove that as a territory, Puerto Rico does not have political power. The letter from the Department of Justice was signed by a second rank official of the Department, not by the Attorney General. If Puerto Rico were a state, the USDOJ would have no authority to tell it to change a referendum.
The original referendum was to have only Statehood and Independence as the options. However, the political party which supports the current status, known in Spanish as “Estado Libre Asociado” lobbied with the Department of Justice to order the inclusion of its status option. The irony is that after the USDOJ ordered the inclusion of the territorial status, and after it was included on the ballot, the party that supports the status quo decided to boycott the plebiscite. Their reason? That the ballot does not say “Estado Libre Asociado.” The ballot says “Current Territorial Status” in English and Spanish.
After the party that supports the status quo decided to boycott the plebiscite, the Puerto Rican Independence Party, which has obtained less than 3% of the vote in the last 4 elections in a row, decided to boycott the plebiscite. Their reason was that the territorial status was included on the ballot. So, just because there’s an option they don’t like, they abandoned their political ideals.
However, two separate groups have been recognized as representatives of the Independence/Free Association option.
Interestingly, a local newspaper conducted a poll which was published this week on how the plebiscite would go. It found that 72% of registered voters plan to vote on the referendum, including a large portion of those voters affiliated with the status quo and independence parties.
When asked for their vote preference, and excluding undecideds and those who said they wouldn’t vote for an option, the results would be something like this: 62% Statehood, 20% Territorial Status; and 18% Independence/Free Association.
It looks like statehood is going to win outright. A recent poll showed 52% of registered voters said they would vote for statehood, and when cutting that back to people who intend on voting it rises to 66%.
http://prdecide.elnuevodia.com/detalle/reportaje/311_plebiscite-boycott-fails-to-seduce-the-masses/
If the Governor wants to win this referendum, he has to make sure to get out the vote. The only reason past referendums failed to impact anything was because there was very low turnout, and thus the results weren’t taken seriously.