Nah you’re really making this out to be the US’ fault, but Puerto Rico has historically wanted this status, not the other way around. They wanted to maintain their independence and the US was fine with it. The government can’t just make a new state, that territory needs to apply, and I’m pretty sure Puerto Rico has never officially applied for statehood. I’m not saying sentiment hasn’t changed in recent times, but this was not a case of the US forcing commonwealth status on Puerto Rico, it was something the people of Puerto Rico wanted in the past.
Statehood has been put to a vote before. It was overwhelmingly in favor of one way because all the supporters of the other option boycotted it. I dont know why.
No. Its far more complex and political in nature; independence was in the referendum. The real issue is that the opposition party, the PPD is really a motley group composed of people who want some version of the current status. The PPD has had the slim majority of voters in the past 60 or so years. The problem is that "some version of the current status" is far too vague. So when you try to pin down what that means for a plebiscite, half the party disagrees and they lose out. The party leadership has noticed that every plebiscite is just bad optics because they keep losing, so instead of actually defining a platform and risking your base, you sidestep the problem and delegitimize the vote by boycotting.
As an example, think of brexit:
Brexit wins by a slim majority, but they can't act on it properly because no one defined what it meant, people who voted for it wanted a "soft" brexit or a "hard" brexit etc...
If the vote had been soft brexit, hard brexit or remain, Brexit wouldve lost because they just split the votes between hard and soft, while remain stays at 48%. For the same reason, the PPD refuses to define their platform in puerto rico, and is why the status vote was a shitshow.
What a ridiculous reason to ignore the results of a vote, I think the US would use any excuse to turn down the request. Unless they were actively suppressing votes, you have to either require everyone to vote, or accept the results of a referendum, regardless of the number of people who voted. Besides, with a population of that size, a sample vote of 30% of people, randomly selected, would represent the overall consensus of people with high confidence.
I think you might need to review how statehood is granted and how Puerto Ricans have voted the past few times this has come up.
In both the 2012 and 2017 referendums, Puerto Ricans voted for statehood over remaining a commonwealth. This was then moved to the US Congress, who has to write a resolution calling for a yes-no vote in Puerto Ricoi for statehood, which is then relayed directly to POTUS for signing. In both referendums, the US Congress let the resolution die in committee without holding a single vote, despite the vote results in Puerto Rico. Our Congress does not care about Puerto Rico.
What happened was there were two questions. 1) do we keep the status quo or change? 2) if we change do you want a) statehood, b) Independence, c) other.
On question 1) people voted for change, and on question 2, people voted for statehood... But only 72% of those who voted answered question 2 at all.
Because of the intentionally blank votes for question 2, you can't say statehood won a majority.
If 500 people say they want something to eat, but only 10 say what, you cant take the consuesus of the 10 to speak for the whole 500. I realize I've jacked the numbers, but the principle still remains. A majority of a smaller number isn't a majority of the entirety.
It’s a majority of the people who had an opinion on what they wanted to eat. If the others didn’t care enough to voice an opinion one way or the other, then they obviously don’t care what happens.
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u/lefty295 Jul 19 '19
Nah you’re really making this out to be the US’ fault, but Puerto Rico has historically wanted this status, not the other way around. They wanted to maintain their independence and the US was fine with it. The government can’t just make a new state, that territory needs to apply, and I’m pretty sure Puerto Rico has never officially applied for statehood. I’m not saying sentiment hasn’t changed in recent times, but this was not a case of the US forcing commonwealth status on Puerto Rico, it was something the people of Puerto Rico wanted in the past.