Democratic Leaders In Puerto Rico Play The Blame Game While Voters Are Disenfranchised
Hillary Clinton won a decisive victory that her opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is not contesting. But the Sanders campaign and Puerto Rico’s local Democratic Party are trading accusations about who is responsible for the decision to slash the number of polling places on the island by more than two thirds — from more than 1,500 to fewer than 430 — just weeks before the election.
When local reporters challenged Puerto Rico’s Democratic Party president Roberto Prats, he shrugged it off as a sign of a healthy democracy.
“If the problem is that many people are participating, that’s a good problem to have,” he told the newspaper El Nuevo Dia. “The important thing is that the voters had the opportunity to exercise their right to vote.”
Yet the polling location cuts significantly depressed turnout. While local officials expected more than 700,000, only 60,671 made it to the ballot box. Though voter turnout in Puerto Rico is usually much higher than in the 50 U.S. states, Sunday’s Democratic race had a dismal showing of just 3.45 percent of eligible voters.
After spending weeks telling the press that the decision to reduce the number of polling sites was based on lack of funding and a lack of poll workers, the local Democratic Party changed its story Sunday and claimed that the Sanders campaign requested the cuts.
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2016/06/06/3784948/puerto-rico-primary-chaos/
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