At least 180 boxes, filled with voting materials and uncounted votes from across Puerto Rico, have surfaced since the Nov. 3 elections, the election commission said Tuesday, raising questions and concerns about the validity of the preliminary results.
Initially, the Puerto Rico State Elections Commission placed the number at 40, but it has continued to rise since the boxes were first reported.
Election officials blamed the new scandal on the volume of early ballots cast on the island, marking the second electoral debacle for Puerto Rico in a three-month period. In August, the U.S. territory was forced to suspend its primary elections because dozens of polling stations never received their ballots on Election Day, while thousands of voters waited in line to vote amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
General elections in Puerto Rico, held every four years alongside presidential elections in the United States, include the selection of seats for governor, legislators, mayors, and resident commissioner. The findings could affect the local elections on the island, but they would not affect the results of the U.S. elections held last week because the residents of the island do not vote in the presidential elections.
Pedro Pierluisi, the candidate for the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, won the gubernatorial race, according to preliminary results, defeating Carlos Delgado Altieri, who was running as a candidate for the Popular Democratic Party, which supports the status quo. Pierluisi received almost 33% of the votes, while Delgado Altieri received about 31.5%. After the results came out on Saturday, Delgado Altieri accepted the defeat in a statement posted on social media.
At a press conference on Tuesday, the commission’s new president Francisco Rosado Colomer, said the exact number of votes inside the boxes could not be determined, but that “there are many.” Rosado Colomer, who is a judge, urged Puerto Ricans to trust the electoral process even after the entity’s disorganization.
“Trust the transparency of the process, that all the votes here are going to be counted,” he said, citing the difference between the preliminary results and the final results. “Your vote has weight and is valid for the commission.”
Additionally, there were still at least 7,000 votes to tabulate in addition to those in the boxes. They are a hodgepodge of absentee votes, votes added by hand from hospitals and inmates, as well as ballots sent by mail that have not yet been returned, according to the digital outlet Noticel.
According to the electoral commissioner of the Puerto Rican Independence Party, Roberto Iván Aponte, the boxes were in the custody of the Absentee And Early Vote Administrative Board, an office within CEE that administers those ballots. Aponte told el Nuevo Herald that the day of the elections had gone well, but that the problem had arisen since more than 227,000 people had requested to vote absentee and early, an exponential increase from previous years.
“If it had been a smaller amount, it would have been carried out without any problem, because on election day there was no problem,” said Aponte. “The big problem is how this early voting issue was handled.”
Aponte said the briefcases contained “all kinds of things.” In addition to seeing briefcases from municipalities such as Guánica, where there are close contests, he indicated that there were early voting applications also among the materials.
“We don’t know exactly how much is in there,” Aponte said. He said it could have an impact in municipal elections where the difference in votes between the candidates is small, as in the municipality-island of Culebra, where the winning candidate for mayor appears to lead by two votes.
Aponte has also questioned the preliminary results of the general elections, “particularly because there were no internal controls or an adequate inventory to count absentee voting and early voting,” according to the San Juan newspaper El Nuevo Día. The electoral commissioner of the NPP blamed what the other four commissioners said on “politicking,” the newspaper reported.
The commission was scheduled to begin its general overview, during which preliminary results are finalized, on Tuesday, but the process was halted. It is expected to resume on Wednesday.
For several decades, elections in Puerto Rico had been recognized in Latin America and the Caribbean as one of the most formidable models to follow and replicate in the region. Puerto Rican electoral expert Héctor Luis Acevedo told el Nuevo Herald in June that the island had had “a greatly respected tradition in the last 36 years” thanks to the results that had been achieved through political consensus.
But Puerto Rico’s reputation as a voting role model was cast into doubt this year. During the primary elections in August dozens of electoral precincts never received their ballots. The Supreme Court of Puerto Rico ordered the elections to be suspended and the process completed a week later.
After several weeks of public pressure, the president of the commission at the time, Juan Ernesto Dávila, resigned.
Through social networks, citizens as well as public officials denounced the actions of the electoral commission and how the general elections were carried out. Aponte told el Nuevo Herald that “the chaos of the primaries dramatically affected” the image of the commission, particularly while the general elections were being organized.
“There were people who questioned whether elections were going to be held on Nov. 3,” Aponte said. “Then they questioned whether there would be elections in 2020. The elections were ultimately held in November through thick and thin. But there is no doubt that this issue of early voting complicated the process.”
But even with the problems of uncounted votes, the electoral commissioner of the Popular Democratic Party, Nicolás Gautier, told el Nuevo Herald that there was a commitment on the part of the election officials to resolve the situation and count all the votes as soon as possible.
“I’m not leaving here until I fix this mess that just happened so it doesn’t happen again in the future,” he said.
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