Puerto Rico’s top court orders voting to resume on Sunday
SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO
Puerto Rico’s Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the votes cast in Sunday’s botched primary election are valid and will be counted. The island’s highest court ordered the election to be continued this coming Sunday, Aug. 16, for precincts unable to cast their ballots or precincts that were not open for eight hours.
The results of the votes cast in the Aug. 9 primary will not be publicly known until the event concludes this weekend, the court decided.
“We hope that in the name of democracy, there are no more failures, inefficiencies, errors or delays. Any other result or deviation would be clearly unacceptable,” the court said in a press release around 7 p.m.
The high court ruled on lawsuits from four of the five gubernatorial primary candidates and from a private citizen concerning Sunday’s suspended local primaries. The high court consolidated and considered all the suits together.
The Elections Commission, CEE for its Spanish initials, suspended the Sunday primaries after voting had begun because the majority of electoral precincts had not received ballots and other materials.
A unanimous agreement between the island’s main political parties and the CEE ordered that all precincts that had received voting materials were to allow voters to go ahead and cast ballots, but any precincts that had not begun voting by 1:45 p.m. had to shut down and send voters home.
The CEE also ordered ballot boxes to be sealed and turned off voting machines until Aug. 16, when electoral officials agreed to hold the primary for the precincts that did not vote. The electoral commission also banned making public any preliminary results from the Aug. 9 partial vote.
The defendants in the five lawsuits filed at the Supreme Court are the CEE; the New Progressive Party’s electoral commissioner, María Dolores “Lolín” Santiago; and the Popular Democratic Party’s electoral commissioner, Lind Merle Feliciano.
The lawsuits asked the court to decide how the primary problems should be resolved:
The lawsuits of the gubernatorial primary candidates Pedro Pierluisi of the NPP and Sen. Eduardo Bhatia of the PDP, which were merged before reaching the court, asked for the partial vote count from Sunday to be counted and made public.
Carlos “Charlie” Delgado Altieri, mayor of the coastal town of Isabela and gubernatorial candidate for the PDP, requested that the primaries be held on or before Thursday, Aug. 13. Like Bhatia and Pierluisi, he asked that the votes from Sunday be tallied and the results made public. The lawsuit also claims that party leaders and the primary electoral commissions do not have the right to “modify, extend, or suspend, an electoral event,” and calls what happened a “violation of the constitutional right to vote.”
Gov. Wanda Vázquez, an NPP gubernatorial primary candidate, asked for new elections at all voting centers that were not open on Sunday by the scheduled opening time of 8 a.m. — including those that did receive voting materials later. Vázquez’s lawsuit also requested that no results from ballots cast in Sunday’s primary be made public.
Carmen Quiñones, a private citizen represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, was not able to vote at her assigned polling center in the municipality of Trujillo Alto. Quiñones asked the court to ensure her right to vote. Her lawsuit claimed that the CEE did not have the legal authority to suspend the primaries and asked the court to declare the voting centers’ closure “illegal” and “unconstitutional.” It also asked for more information on the protocols used in Sunday’s primaries.
The only gubernatorial primary candidate who did not sue the CEE was the PDP mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz.
Two candidates for mayor of San Juan and Guaynabo also sued to invalidate Sunday’s primary results in lower courts on Tuesday, bringing the number of lawsuits against the CEE to at least seven in two days. However, these have not yet gone to the Supreme Court.
As the primaries awaited resolution, the cast ballots and voting materials from Sunday’s elections were stored at a San Juan sports arena in vaults under guard.
Puerto Rico’s primary elections were originally supposed to be held in
June, but were pushed back to Aug. 9 due to the coronavirus pandemic.
During Sunday’s primary, Puerto Rico experienced unprecedented electoral chaos. Of the island’s 110 precincts, only 35 and 40 percent are thought to have held the PDP and NPP primaries respectively.
Most Puerto Ricans who arrived at their assigned polling centers, after braving the COVID-19 pandemic, were unable to vote.
But even at precincts that received the ballots there were other issues. Some precincts opened later than expected, creating confusion among voters. The daily El Nuevo Día reported that people in San Juan were leaving precincts without casting a vote after experiencing long wait times, and that there were not enough poll workers to deal with the large numbers of voters. Problems with the voting machines were also reported, and in one town where the precincts opened, the polling centers ran out of ballots.
There had been indications before the election that problems were brewing.
On July 19, the electoral commissioners of the NPP, the PDP, and the Puerto Rican Independence Party told the San Juan daily Primera Hora they were worried that voting machines were not ready, that voter lists had not been updated and that regulations that oversee the primaries had not been settled.
And during early voting for NPP posts on Aug. 1, in which 28,000 people were expected to vote, the ballots arrived late at various precincts and there were problems with the voting machines. The CEE and the NPP commissioner created a contingency plan so that those who couldn’t cast early votes would be able to do so at the Aug. 9 primaries.
Several media outlets reported on the lack of printed ballots for the primaries. El Nuevo Día reported that Printech, the only company on the island certified to print ballots, had told the CEE they would not be ready by election day. CEE President Juan Ernesto Dávila nevertheless decided the primary would go forward.