It was a lengthy process, but Puerto Rico finally has certified election results from the November 2024 election.
Puerto Rico Resident Commissioner Jenniffer Gonzalez-Colon emerged the winner in the race for Governor. She received 526,020 votes, 41.26%, in a five-party race. This was nearly 100,000 votes and eight percent more than former Governor Pedro Pierluisi in 2020. Governor Gonzalez-Colon was sworn in as Governor of Puerto Rico on January 2. She is a staunch statehood supporter and a Republican.
Pablo José Hernández Rivera won the position of Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico with 530,540 votes, 43.5% of the vote. With respect to the U.S.-Puerto Rico political relationship, he is a strong supporter of the a “commonwealth” status but does not plan to use his new platform in Congress to advocate for a change in Puerto Rico’s political status as a U.S. territory. He is expected to caucus with Democrats.
Puerto Rico thus has a split ticket for its main elected officials, both in terms of the national parties and the political parties in Puerto Rico.
The statehood party won more than two-thirds of the seats in both houses of the Legislative Assembly. The Puerto Rico constitution requires, in the case of lopsided election results like these, that the numbers of members will be increased to give a minority party or parties additional representation.
The statehood party got 407,257 straight party ticket votes, compared with 368,573 in 2020, while the “commonwealth” party dropped from 323,733 to 241,150. The other three political parties dropped as well.
The status vote
Statehood got a 58.5% majority with 615,868 votes, up from 52.5% in 2020. There were more votes for statehood than for any of the candidates, including the Resident Commissioner, which may explain his reluctance to advocate for a change in Puerto Rico’s status in Congress. If he were to follow the will of the Puerto Rican public, as stated in the last plebiscite, this would place him in the statehood camp. The “commonwealth” option that the Resident Commissioner favors instead is more akin to the concept of sovereign free association, which received 313,259 votes (29.57), roughly half as much.
While Hernández Rivera continues to claim that statehood did not win the status referendum, this conclusion is only possible by counting blank ballots. The ballot clearly stated that blank ballots would not be counted; blank ballots are in fact never counted in U.S. elections as they cannot by definition reflect the voters’ intent.
The voting tallies for independence and “Sovereignty in Free Association” were initially incorrect. Voting machines first counted 29.35% for independence and 12.17% for the free association option but the Elections Commission said a few days ago that the recount revealed the votes for these two options were reversed. Independence ended up with 11.82% of the vote, and sovereign free association – which is essentially independence with U.S. authority of Puerto Rico’s defense/national security – was 29.57%.
