The boycott served it’d purpose. It can only show that less than a quarter of Puerto Ricans want statehood. If there had been a full turnout that number might be a third or more. There’s no basis for using this vote to take action now. It was pointless for achieving statehood anyway, the congress was not going to move on statehood even if the majority of Puerto Rico voted for, but it
Boy my memory is bad – this thread I started was just last month, and somehow I’d forgotten all about it:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=20271433
No prob, by now we’re used to having to go “Um, is this mic on?”
Which is why I don’t expect much action as a huge chunk of Congress will have to have the whole situation explained to them from the start tabula rasa, AGAIN, and they’ll likely just use a Heritage or Cato (or their leftist equivalent) cribsheet to make up their minds.
I don’t like this boycott business. The anti-statehood contingents are trying to say “well look at the low turnout, that obviously means that most people don’t want statehood!”. But if they’re as strong as they say, they could have made the same statement much more clearly by showing up and voting their respective positions. And their given reasons are weak, as well: The status quo faction shouldn’t need a detailed description of what their preferred status entails, because everyone already knows what the status quo is; they’re living it. The most obvious conclusion I can draw is that statehood really is the consensus view of the people of Puerto Rico, and that the only recourse the non-statehood factions had was to muddle that clarity.
And that also reinforces this view. They’re saying that low turnout is evidence against the statehood faction, but they’re also saying that if turnout had been high, that would likewise be evidence against the statehood faction.
Put another way, I recently read in another thread advice to a lawyer: If the law is in your favor, hammer on the law; if the facts are in your favor, hammer on the facts; and if neither is in your favor, hammer on the table. It looks like the anti-statehood factions here are just hammering on the table.
As to my own views on Puerto Rican statehood, I’ve always felt that self-determination was best here, no matter which way it ends up going. I’ve never thought that the status quo was stable, and expected that the eventual result would be either statehood or independence, but if the Puerto Ricans wanted to maintain the status quo, or couldn’t come to a consensus on either of the other options, that was their prerogative.
Are Republicans being short sighted on Puerto Rico? They don’t want an additional blue state, obviously. But, if Puerto Rico’s economy fails, a lot of Puerto Ricans are going to immigrate to the mainland US, and Florida seems like a likely state for people to move. Would it be better to add a small blue state than guarantee that Florida is blue for the foreseeable future?
I’m not very familiar with current opinion in Puerto Rico, but suppose that most Puertoricans don’t really know what the best decision to take would be. So if the anti-statehood side asks to come out and vote for the status quo, they’ll get some voters, but maybe not enough to counterbalance the pro-statehood side. We may end up with 50 % turnout, with 55 % or 60 % in favour of statehood, which might be seen as a mandate for statehood.
On the other hand, less than 25 % turnout, even with 97 % in favour of statehood, doesn’t look at all like a mandate. Being admitted as a US state is irreversible, so as long as there is no better option around which Puertoricans can rally, boycotting the referendum helps postpone the decision.
The suggestion that statehood is so strongly supported as to attract 95%, but simultaneously so weakly supported that 2/3 of the population doesn’t care seems unlikely. The most reasonable interpretation would seem to be that a significant number of statehood opponents did deliberately boycott.
Whether to take that boycott into account is a fair question, but presenting the result as somehow indicative of a strong political consensus seems inaccurate.
Puerto Rico is not small. It has over 3 million people, which places it in a middle rank by population of states. Think Oregon or Kentucky. It’d get something like 7 electoral votes.
The type of government is different between commonwealths and territories. For one thing, commonwealths vote for their governors, territorial governments are appointed by the President.
OTOH, Puerto Rico is not large.
If every single Puerto Rican moved to greater Miami, leaving the island absolutely deserted, our local metro area population would go up about 50%, Florida’s would go up about 15%, and the 50-state US’s would go up about 1%.
It’d be chaotic to absorb them all just into Miami all at once. But with a little help from NYC we’d hardly notice the difference.
IOW, Puerto Rico is small. Like fraction-of-a-major-city small.
Sorry, not so any more.
ALL the remaining unincorporated territories as they exist today have locally elected governors and legislatures and governor-appointed local cabinets. The presidentially appointed local governments were done away with by the late 1970s save for the Canal Zone which was merely dissolved.
Furthermore, Puerto Rico had locally elected governor and cabinet for four years before the adoption of the Commonwealth constitution.
The one variation that is shared by the two “commonwealths” of PR and the NMI is having a constitution that was drafted by a local constitutional convention and ratified by the Congress. HOWEVER that document is NOT what controls the US/Island relationship in either case. In the case of PR it is the Federal Relations Act, a straight up act of Congress, and in the NMI it is the Northern Marianas Covenant, entered when NMI went from UN trusteeship to US sovereignty.
The USVI and Guam have both convened to draft constitutions, but neither has passed muster with the Congress for various reasons. So they remain operating under Organic Acts.
For American Samoa, the Congress delegated on the Secretary of Interior to run it administratively rather than pass an Organic Act, and when the residents passed a Samoan Constitution, the Secretary approved the internal government be operated under it.
Each territory has different states of relationship. Puerto Rico is inside the US Customs Zone, all the others outside. PR is excluded from the Federal Income Tax, Marianas is not. USVI are a Free Port. Samoans are NOT US citizens. Guam and NMI have been variously exempted from Federal Labor and Immigration Laws.
In short, every single unincorporated territory or “commonwealth” can be said to be a special case unlike all the others. This is due to case law on territories, that starting in 1902 distinguished between “incorporated” territory, where the federal constitutional requirements of fiscal and legal uniformity apply, and “unincorporated” where they do not and can therefore be each treated differently.
The key question is how high the turnout would have been without the boycotts (which certainly did have some effect in depressing the turnout). If turnout would have been 75%, then the statehood faction (which was unaffected by the boycotts) would have been a small minority, while if it would have been 30%, statehood is the clear winner. The best way to know what the turnout would have been would have been to not have the boycotts to begin with. Absent that, though, does anyone know what typical turnout has been for other Puerto Rico referenda?
And I disagree that 97% of 24% looks like less of a mandate than does 60% of 50%. The key difference is that you can’t count the votes of those who don’t vote. Ordinarily, you’d assume that the non-voters just don’t care, and so a consensus of all of the voters is all that you need. And 60% of the voters might be a majority, but it might not be enough of a majority to call it a consensus. Here, of course, we can’t just assume that all of the non-voters didn’t care, since some abstained from voting precisely because they did care, but we can’t tell how many didn’t care. It’s a dishonest way for the anti-statehood factions to try to claim all of the apathetic folks.
It’s sort of like the tale of the Old West rancher who declared his brand to be a blank mark, and so all unbranded cattle are his. And it runs the same risk, that some other rancher might decide to just add his brand “on top of” all of that guy’s cattle.
Chronos, have you actually looked at previous PR turnouts for elections and referendums? It is indeed closer to 75% usually.
Amid Historically Low Turnout, Puerto Ricans Vote for Statehood
Using this vote as proof of a concensus would be outrageous to anyone who took a second to look into it.
ISTM referenda like this are always fundamentally flawed ab initio. Ref Brexit. Most people don’t know enough to have an opinion and the electorate tends to mumble. How much, really, was the not-quite 52% vote in favor involving 72% of the registered voters but only 65% of the voting age populace a clear unequivocal demand by the voters for a massive change? Arguably it was not.
Referenda always end up being, in addition to an IQ test the electorate mostly fails, a simple popularity judgment about the incumbent leadership of the day. How does one properly disentangle that effect rom the actual question at hand?
Once you have several realistic choices such as for PR options for statehood, status quo, hard independence, soft independence, or rejiggered status quo, the mumbling gets far worse. A two-part question attempting to “focus” the result is flat useless. that’s game-theoretic obvious.
Would the tldr version be: Democratic change is impossible because people suck?
I’ll tell you one thing, this shows there’s some crazy political discipline in Puerto Rico. Can you imagine how hard it would be to stage a vote boycott like that in some other part of the U.S.? And the “yes” party still got 25% of the voters who didn’t boycott to all show up and vote for them? Stunning.
Hell yeah, the party discipline here is holding strong.
However that’s still over 300K votes for statehood from the last go-around who felt they could stay home since there was no fight. Easier to motivate someone to just sit idle than to go do something, I guess.
No, I hadn’t actually looked at previous turnouts. That’s why I was asking. Given the historical turnouts, it looks like this one really isn’t a consensus.
But I’ll reiterate my distaste for the boycott, because without the boycott, it would have been clear that there was no consensus without needing that additional context. As it is right now, mainlanders are going to be seeing headlines that say “Puerto Ricans vote 97% for statehood”, and pressuring their members of Congress on that basis, without reading further into the story for all of the details. Puerto Ricans might, as a result of this boycott, find themselves facing a bill of statehood that they never actually wanted.
Plus, of course, even if we take this referendum as meaning that statehood isn’t actually that popular, it gives us no indication of the relative strengths of the status quo and independence factions, each of which is probably going to try to claim the entire boycotting population among their numbers.
So is Virginia.
Does this happen? Do Americans really care about this issue?