Could 2024 Finally Be Puerto Rico's Year? | Opinion

I'd like to herald the election year 2024 with the second-strangest story about the 2000 election. The top strangest, which happened in Florida, is known to most readers. I bet the second is not. It involves a U.S. district judge and U.S. army vet who was barred from voting for president—yet nearly swung the election.

I had an intensive personal interest in this affair because I was barred that year as well. For the same reason. I was barred because I had just moved to Puerto Rico, to serve as the Caribbean bureau chief of the Associated Press. Here's a quick rundown of the basic reality that suddenly confronted me and still confronts the 3.3 million people of the island, who are all U.S. citizens and U.S. citizens only.

U.S. courts hold sway over the island and federal law applies, as do U.S. border controls. To enter Puerto Rico, you must enter the United States, which is not so easy for non-Americans. Islanders—unlike their Caribbean neighbors—can just get on a plane and land in the mainland with no border controls. That's why more than half the people of Puerto Rican descent live in the mainland, legally. That's why people die in rickety boats trying to sneak into Puerto Rico from the Dominican Republican, illegally.

Islanders serve in the U.S. military and have given their lives to defend America, but they have no say in deciding on its wars since there is no representation in Congress. And their most interesting disenfranchisement is for the presidency.

There are, as far as I can tell, three types of people who can vote in U.S. presidential elections. First is the simplest—U.S. citizens residing in a U.S. state. Second is the one that has usually applied to me—citizens residing outside the United States. The third category are citizens residing in the District of Columbia.

There are two bizarre things about that setup.

The first involves D.C.—not its residents' right to vote but rather the newness of that right. Residents of D.C. gained the right to vote for president of the United States via the 23rd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which was proposed by Congress in 1960 and ratified by the states in 1961. That's right: Until the 1964 election, the residents of the nation's capital could not vote for president.

If anyone can imagine that going down well in London, Paris, Rome, or Madrid, they have a vivid imagination.

The second oddity is who's left out (other than non-citizens). It is a very small group: U.S. citizens residing in Puerto Rico and a handful of other sparsely populated "territories" like the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa and Guam. The vast majority of the affected population is in Puerto Rico.

Because of my career as a foreign correspondent, I have happily voted for American presidential candidates from bases in Romania, Britain, Israel, and Egypt. You get an "absentee ballot" and vote in your last state of residency, generally—in my case Pennsylvania. But in 2000, I could not vote; that's because I was living in Puerto Rico. I was not outside the United States.

For a brief moment there was hope. A group of activists for redefining Puerto Rico as a U.S. state asked the U.S. District Court in San Juan to order the government of Puerto Rico to hold a presidential election, a function that in the U.S. is carried out by states (and, as said, D.C.). Luckily, they happened upon the Hon. Jaime Pieras.

Born in San Juan, the young Pieras had studied at the Catholic University of America and earned his law degree from Georgetown. After a stint as a U.S. army officer from 1946 to 1949 he returned home where he practiced law and served as Puerto Rico's representative to the Republican National Committee until President Reagan appointed him to the bench.

On Aug. 29, 2000, Judge Pieras ordered Puerto Rico to hold a presidential vote "with all possible expediency," instructing Congress to count the resulting electoral votes. "By negating the U.S. citizens residing in Puerto Rico the right to vote, the federal government, particularly Congress, would be acting outside its scope of authority and denying a right that flows from national citizenship," Pieras wrote.

The local governor, Pedro Rossello, was a committed "statehooder" who in an interview with me had called Puerto Rico "a disenfranchised ghetto." He rammed through a law enabling the vote, drew up a local electoral college based on the number of electors Puerto Rico would have as a state, and printed Gore-Bush ballots.

That's when the Justice Department woke up and appealed the Pieras ruling to the 1^st Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over the states of New England plus Puerto Rico. That court overturned the San Juan ruling in October but issued a call on Congress to fix this long-simmering ridiculousness, with the chief judge in Boston, Juan R. Torruella, writing: "The perpetuation of this colonial condition runs against the very principles upon which this nation was founded."

How long has it simmered? Well, all this dates back to the Spanish American war, following which, in the 1898 Treaty of Paris, Puerto Rico was ceded to the United States. The islanders became U.S. citizens in 1917, but the basic reality for the Spanish-speaking territory was established when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1922 that the archipelago (for it is more than one island) was a territory rather than part of the Union.

In 1952 Congress approved a local constitution that meaninglessly declared the territory a "commonwealth," which also applies to my home state of Pennsylvania. The Puerto Ricans don't even bother with the nonsensical label—they prefer the Spanish "estado libre asociado"—meaning "freely associated state."

Over the years the Puerto Ricans have held a series of non-binding referendums on their status. Finally, in 2020, "statehood" won a clear majority of 53 percent in a referendum in which most of the electorate (55 percent) participated. This is now Puerto Rico's request of Congress.

What does the U.S. want? It's complicated.

For a while, the U.S. had wanted the territory for strategic reasons. It maintained a massive naval base, Roosevelt Roads, that hosted the Southern Command, and it used the small Puerto Rican island of Vieques as a bombing range, much upsetting the locals. But "Rosie Roads" was shut down in 2004.

I figure many Americans now would be happy to grant the Puerto Ricans independence, but only about a tenth of the population there seem to want that. The Puerto Ricans are quite confused. They're not just "Spanish-speaking"—many of them speak little English. The place is full of American brands and has a certain American look—but also the feel of a foreign country.

U.S. politics are blocking any progress, because Puerto Rico is assumed to be solidly Democratic. That's evident in recent comments by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who as a congressman co-sponsored legislation to establish a process to allow Puerto Rico to become the 51^st state.

DeSantis no longer supports his own initiative, and when asked about it this month he said this: "I would never do anything to give Democrats any additional Senate seats, so whatever it would be, it would have to be Republican seats, or a Republican state to match the Democrat state. I understand how closely divided the country is and I'm not going to upset that."

And it's not just a matter of two more Senate seats. Remember that 2000 election? Even after the theft of Florida (the recount was stopped as former Vice President Al Gore was about to take the lead), President George W. Bush's Electoral College margin was 271-266. If the Boston Court had not stepped in, the eight electoral votes of Puerto Rico would have swung that election, from which everything else has followed, to President Alberto Gore.

Let's make 2024 the year that this absurdity is finally amended one way or the other.

Dan Perry is managing partner of the New York-based communications firm Thunder11. He is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.