Elections to Puerto Rico's Legislative Assembly

August, 2003

Most elected bodies in American government are elected according to winner-take-all rules (some by plurality, some by majority). The largest exception is Puerto Rico, an American territory with 3.8 million American citizens. Puerto Rico uses an unusual form of full representation to elect members of its Legislative Assembly, that likely contributes to generating one of the highest levels of voter participation in the western hemisphere -- and higher than any of the 50 states in the 2000 presidential election.

The Legislative Assembly of Puerto Rico has two chambers, the Camara de Representantes (House of Representatives), and the Senado (Senate ).

The House has 51+ members, and the Senate has 27 + members. The + refers to the fact that the size of the legislature can fluctuate slightly based on the results in a given election, due to the Law of Minorites, which is explained below.

Of the 51+ House members, 40 are elected in single-member districts using plurality voting. 11 are elected at large using the the Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV) system, which is a form of full representation.

Of the 27+ Senate members, 16 are elected in two-member districts using at-large plurality / block voting. 11 are elected at large using SNTV.

There are three parties which have seats in the Legislative Assembly. These are the PPD (Popular Democratic Party), the PNP (New Progressive Party), and the PIP (Puerto Rican Independence Party).

Technically, parties can nominate up to 11 candidates for the SNTV seats in the House, and 11 for the SNTV seats in the Senate. In practice, though, PPD and PNP tend to nominate 6 candidates for each chamber, and the PIP usually only nominates one. Also, the larger parties vary the order of their candidates on the ballot from area to area, so that each candidate is on the top of the list on a roughly equal number of ballots. Voters usually select the top choice for their party on the ballot they receive, which means that most candidates running from the same party usually receive a roughly equal number of votes for the SNTV seats in each chamber.

It is possible for parties to lose seats by running too many candidates (hence splitting up the vote too much) or too few candidates (hence not going for as many seats as they could actually win).

Law of Minorities

Additional members can be added to the Senate or to the House of Representatives, according to the provisions of the Law of Minorities.

This law states that if any party has more than two thirds of the seats in either chamber, but has not received two thirds of the vote for the office of Governor, then the opposition parties are eligible for additional seats, in order to give the opposition (collectively) one third of the seats in the chamber .

So, if a majority party did not get over two thirds in the gubernatorial election, then the opposition (collectively) is entitled to 9 seats of the 27+ seats in the Senate, and 17 seats of the 51+ in the house.

Parties must have at least 3% of the vote for governor in order to qualify for additional seats.

The additional seats are divided up among minority parties with respect to their portion of the vote for Governor. That is, they are added such as to bring a minority party’Äôs share of the opposition seats closer to their share of the opposition votes for Governor.

In the 2000 election, one seat was added to the Senate (which the PNP received), in accordance with the law of minorities, because the PDP had just over two thirds of the seats. No seats were added to the House of Representatives, because no party had over two thirds of the seats there.

The law of minorities is unlikely to add more than a handful of seats to the Assembly. It has come into effect in 1952, 1956, 1960, 1964, 1972, 1988, 1992, 1996 and 2000.

Overall Proportionality

Although the SNTV seats and the law of minorities do offer some help, the overall results of Puerto Rican elections, determined mostly by the district elections, tend to be highly disproportional. (See our analysis of the 2000 election.)

Turnout

2,022,276 people voted in the 2000 elections, which is 82.6% of enrolled voters, and 74.4% of the over-18 population (which was 2,716,509 according to the US Census).

Elections

The last election for the Legislative Assembly and the Governor of Puerto Rico was held on November 7, 2000. The next election will be held in November of 2004.

Results of the 2000 elections can be found in greatdetailat[http://electionspuertorico.org/2000/cuadros.html]. (Or translated into English by Google at [http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Felectionspuertorico.org%2F2000%2Fcuadros.html&langpair=es%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools])

Also, we at CVD have prepared an analysis of the results of the 2000 Legislative Elections, which compares the amount of votes that each party received with their share of seats in the Assembly, and analyzes the dispropotionality between seats and votes. This is available at [http://www.fairvote.org/pr/global/puertoricola2000.htm]

Sources and Links

http://www.ceepur.net/?en
(Commonwealth Elections Commission web site in English)

http://electionspuertorico.org/home_en.html
(’ÄúElections in Puerto Rico.’Äù Very excellent resource page for elections in Puerto Rico.)
http://electionspuertorico.org/cgi-bin/legislature.cgi
(A lookup feature within ’ÄúElections in Puerto Rico,’Äù which has very detailed results from past legislative elections, including the elections via SNTV, for example [http://electionspuertorico.org/cgi-bin/legislature.cgi?voto=dspr&2000=on]

______________________________________________________________________
Copyright ¬© 2003     The Center for Voting and Democracy
6930 Carroll Ave, Suite 610, Takoma Park MD 20912
(301) 270-4616      info@fairvote.org