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 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 news 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, Maria Dolores "Lolin" 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. 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 Vazquez, 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. Vazquez's lawsuit also requested that no results from ballots cast in Sunday's primary be made public.
_ Carmen Quinones, 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. Quinones 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 Yulin 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% 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 Dia 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 Dia 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 Davila nevertheless decided the primary would go forward.
At a Sunday news conference, Vazquez said that the preparation and delivery of voting materials were the "absolute responsibility" of the elections commission. She called for Davila to resign. Davila has said that he will not leave his post. The electoral commissioners for the NPP and the PDP have said they will not leave their positions until after the primaries are concluded.
Davila attributed the election failures to a delay in printing ballots at Printech. He told El Nuevo Dia that if the ballots had been received as little as 12 hours before the election, the primaries would have gone off without problems. At 2 a.m. last Sunday, ballots were still being printed.
However, the CEE had placed the order for the 10 million ballots needed for the election in early July, just over a month before the primaries. Digital outlet Noticel reported that the elections commission was aware it could take at least 90 days for the ballot paper to arrive in Puerto Rico and to print the materials.
By July 20, Noticel said that "Davila visited the facilities for the first time and confirmed the printing paper had not arrived." By July 22, Printech began to print the ballots 24-7, but it was evident that the printing would not be finished in time.
As of Aug. 10, the CEE had not placed an order for the Nov. 3 general election ballots, with only 83 days to go.
Critics have also slammed the CEE for lack of experience. Before being appointed as president of the electoral commission in 2018, Davila was the Secretary for the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico and had previously served as a legal officer for a judge.
In June, Davila fired all of the CEE's vice presidents, who had electoral experience, as well as the deputy secretaries because a new electoral code eliminated those positions and assigned broader powers to the commission head.
The controversial code, signed into law by Vazquez, was authored by Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz. It was approved less than five months before the general election.
Hector Luis Acevedo, a professor of electoral law and a leading elections expert on the island, told the Miami Herald that Puerto Rico had a well-respected voting tradition for over three decades. He called Sunday's primaries a "historic failure that needs to be fixed immediately."
"The rights of the people of Puerto Rico and the voters of the two parties who, defying the pandemic, came out by hundreds of thousands to vote have been violated," Acevedo said. The new electoral law had the intention of "perpetuating the governing party's power" and was a "coup" by Rivera Schatz and the pro-statehood party, he added.
Acevedo, a former mayor of San Juan who is affiliated with the PDP, also criticized the electoral code's reduction of experienced staffers.
"You can't go to the supermarket and order 2 pounds of experience and competence," he said.
Edwin Mundo, a former NPP electoral commissioner and Pierluisi campaign strategist, told the Herald that he disagrees that the electoral code was responsible for the fiasco because the CEE was following protocol in running the primary.
