in partnership with the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College 
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| in partnership with the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College |
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The State of Puerto Rican Politics: Aqui Y Alla Presented by Amilcar Barreto and Angelo Falcon. |
 | THE ELECTION THAT WASN'T -- The first U.S. Presidential Election in Puerto Rico |
| It´s been said before that Latin America is a land of magic surrealism and Puerto Rico is certainly no exception. Being a territory of the United States hasn´t changed that in the lease. I´m going to do a brief overview of what happened in these past November elections in Puerto Rico but, keeping with the theme of the surreal, I´m going to start with the election that wasn´t and that was the 2000 presidential election in Puerto Rico.
Earlier this year, I think it was around June, a group of about 11 citizens from the town of Aguadilla decided they were going to take a case to the Federal court in San Juan, namely they insisted that as Puerto Ricans, as U.S. citizens, they had a right to vote for the U.S. President. They took this case to court and some of us were quite surpised to hear that Judge Jaime Pieras in San Juan actually agreed with them, citing that the right to vote is based on citizenship not based on residency. Now to be blunt, especially for a federal judge, someone obviously has not read, in this case, his constitution. The U.S. Constitution says clearly as we find in the case recently with Florida. The election is based on state elections and it is the states that choose the Electors. And the Electors are based on how many senators you have, always two, how many congressmen you have. So that Alaska with two senators and one congressman has 3 electoral votes. So California which I think has 52 congressmen and two senators has 54 electoral votes. I say this is rather shocking because there´s only one territory in the American system that has the right to a presidential vote and that´s the District of Columbia and that took a Constitutional amendment. But still governor Roselló decided hey he was a federal judge, he just made a ruling, he said it´s okay, so I´m going to go ahead and we´re going to hold Puerto Rico´s first ever presidential election. About a month before the election, the first circuit court of appeals in Boston ruled this is unconstitutional, this is a joke. The Puerto Rican Supreme Court ruled only a couple of days before the election, this thing is null. It is invalid. The law that established the presidential election in Puerto Rico is unconstitional. So literally millions of dollars were spent printing up ballots that were never used. |
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