Convergencia por Bernie Sanders
10 HOURS AGO · PUBLIC

What Happened- The Puerto Rico Democratic Primary

A volunteer’s open letter

This is an open letter to all the people who at some point were interested in the Puerto Rican Democratic primaries. Even though Puerto Rico's language is Spanish I want all the people from the States and around the world to understand, so, this will be in English. Excuse my grammatical errors, as this is my second language and let me go into detail.

I am really appalled by the accusation of the local Democratic Party, Partido Demócrata de Puerto Rico, trying to shift the blame to Sander's campaign for all the disorganization and voter suppression down here in P.R. Let give you some back story.

The Sander's campaign in Puerto Rico was a completely grass roots efforts for months. It was different individuals, group of friends and strangers who came together through knowing volunteers from the States as common friends or because they had in common one of the thousands of diaspora Puerto Ricans who live in the States and voted or were going to vote for Sanders. We came together mostly through the internet and random meetings. I even met some randomly as they were handing out homemade Bernie flyers when I was trying to get university student registered before the April 16 deadline. That deadline was NEVER a priority for the local Democratic Party, I don't even remember them talking about it on the press, or making big announcement. Maybe a lonely post on Facebook. I personally know about 5 people who wanted to vote and couldn't because they never heard of the deadline and thought they could register in the same week of the primary. As we know the social media only covers a small demographic. That said, we organize, we got together. A few groups came out of it, some by towns like Pepino con Bernie 2016, a town from the west coast and Bayamón por Bernie Sanders, a city closer to San Juan. The most interesting volunteer group was Convergencia por Bernie Sanders which is a group that represented one of the greatest victory in Sander's campaign in PR. It was a group of volunteers from different territory status beliefs: pro statehood,pro independence, and people who fight for more sovereignty powers of PR within the current relations as well as apolitical people and even anarchist to form a coalition for Bernie and his ethos to win in PR.. During the time that coalition was formed we came in contact with the official campaign, great people like Betsy Franceschini and Giulianna Di Lauro. All that time that was happening, we were demanding through emails and calls to the local Democratic Party that the local primary would be an open primary and not a closed caucus. In Puerto Rico most political process from our local parties (we have a semi autonomous state so we have our own political system) are open primaries or semi open primaries NEVER a caucus. We did prevail, they chanced it in May, after the registration deadline was had passed.

That said, we were very skeptical the local Democratic Party, since they were openly promoting Hillary in the press and its president, Roberto Prats, who campaigned for Clinton in Nevada for the Latino vote. McKlintock, VP of the Democratic Party, was making fun of pro-independence people (who usually boycott the all US party primaries here) who were with Sanders because he insinuated they were contradicting themselves by participating. He also suggested Hillary had already had this in the bag, Prats did this too. Most of the local media, as they do in the States, never took Sanders seriously until a few weeks before the primary when they figured out he was coming to visit Puerto Rico and even then the pundits were saying he had no chance of winning here or elsewhere. Unlike Hillary Clinton, he did not come to fundraiser 200,000 dollars and leave. Sanders campaign in Puerto Rico came to learn about the situations and necessities of Puerto Rico and it was a success. 5,000 people when to see him at my alma matter, UPRRP. That's when everything became more and more difficult.

The local parties in Puerto Rico help their primaries on the same date as the local Democratic primaries. This was conceived by the local Democratic party because they thought poll workers from the local parties were going to be able to work for their primary. The opposite happened. Most certified poll workers were already working (it is volunteer work, not paid) for their own local parties. Both the official party and the Bernie campaign (there was no Hillary campaign, the Hillary campaign was the local party) were struggling to get poll workers trained and certified to cover all 1500 plus voting locations. The reality that we did not have enough time or people to cover all polling places, that thousands of paper ballots were not going to be supervised, sunk in. So an agreement was met, that the polling places were to be reduced. The official number of polling places and which one were to be open was the sole responsibility of the DEMOCRATIC PARTY not Bernie Sander's campaign. This is how THEY handled it:

In towns outside of metropolitan areas in the island, you only had available one or two polling places and they usually were outside of the city centers and most in off -the-main road locations, or 20 minutes or more from the city center. Public transportation on Sunday is basically non existing. In the town of Isabela, with a population of 45,000 aprox. , had ONE open polling place. The official list of the polling places was release on the week of the primary, and kept changing until 3 or 4 days before the primary. The Sander's campaign did an open google doc with an unofficial list for the public, which was easy to if you knew your voting precinct, and released it to the press. Sander's volunteers created a web app where people could write in their voting card number and could find out their polling place, even if you did not know your voting precinct. Most people did not have their usually polling place assigned. That web app crashed on the day of the primary because it used the data base from the Government’s ( the CEE in Spanish-- Commission of State Elections) website data base which crash because of influx of people trying to find where to vote. NO HELP the local democratic party.

When it came to our poll workers, the certifications were delayed. For the prison vote, Friday June 3rd, we could not get a poll worker to be certified or to count a vote because they never certified on time even though the Sander's campaign handed in their paperwork in the time frame the democratic party allowed. We got to be observers only because we brought lawyers and by then the process was halfway done in the prisons. That vote was rumored to be almost unanimous for Clinton, even McKlintock was saying that Clinton was wining in the prison vote in a tweet he later deleted. By Saturday, June 4th, by the Democratic party was still giving making everything impossible for the certification, one of our volunteers and lawyers were there the entire Saturday pressuring them to certify us. The certifications did not come until wee AM hours of Sunday, June 5th, some even showed up at the polling places without being certified and then got their certification emailed to them as the boxes with paper ballots got to the polling places by Hillary's or local primary poll workers. We were scrambling to send people to all the school that had gotten democratic ballots. Some voting places ended up with only ONE poll worker or opened late.

The polling places were a mess, communication was a mess, people did not know where they were supposed to vote (our web app crashed after 7:30-8am) even polling workers trained by the democratic party looked lost. The lists were incomplete so people had to be written in (at one point we had to use notepads, literally), if they had a voting card with an address that could vote in that precinct they were allowed to vote. People finger's or hand were not mark as they voted, so they could vote in more than one polling place in their precinct if they choose to do that without getting caught right there. All thanks to the local Democratic Party. Lines were slow specially polling places in metropolitan areas, in San Juan the lines had hundreds of people even after 3pm, when the polls were closed. Some people waited 3.5 hours to vote. One of our volunteers had to offer a polling place help (not a poll worker) and Roberto Prats came to count vote with them because it was taking so long in one of the polling places in the capital of San Juan. The official number of polling places that opened was not 450 plus as it was announced but 360 plus and only because so many Bernie poll workers came out. We basically help the local Democratic Party run this election, if it were up to them less than 300 polling places would have been functional. We are taking notes and testimonies of all electoral and handling irregularities we were witness to and we will make them public or hand it in for investigation to our local authorities or through the federal authorities.

The results are still coming in but Hillary will not get more than 60% of the votes, and we expect the gap to be closer to 58-57% to 38%. This even with some local parties like PNP and some from the PPD, who are pro neo liberal public policies, telling their people to vote for Hillary. We were going against not only that but a local paper telling people that they needed to support Hillary so we could stop Trump. We were going against the local Democratic Party championing for Clinton and not being neutral at all, having local beers with Bill Clinton as a publicity stunt while Sanders visited el Caño de Martin Peña, one of our poorest and polluted communities, with barely any press. Even with basically no political structure against one of the most recognizable political brand names in the world, even against the US media saying it was a sure shot for Clinton while people were still in line, even with very little resources and many obstacles We did it, she did not win by a big landslide. Clinton won by basically 70% against Obama 8 years ago, we did not give Hillary the 65% of the delegated that she needs to keep winning and clinch the nomination. She did unite us against all that she stands for; neoliberal policies, big banks, money, taking money from corporations who are clearly against policies to combat climate change, keeping the economic and political status quo. We stood against the PR Debt Bill that proposes to have a Junta to control our government and forced to pay the debt without regards to the public services or our democracy, which Clinton is ok with, and the colonial treatment of our country that the Clintons have ignored for so long.

The local Democratic Party, El Partido Demócrata de Puerto Rico, is the one to blame for this debacle and after I saw and heard that they were trying to blame the Sander's campaign for the disaster and voter suppression I demand the resignation not only of Roberto Prats but of Kenneth McKlintock. You two should be a shame and are a disgrace to our local democracy. At the end of the vote count (which we are still waiting for on June 6) we can compare with the primary which took place 8 years ago and you will see that at least 100,000 to 200,000 less people voted this primary. You two are to blame!

Thank you to all the Bernie Sander's volunteers and funcionarios (poll workers). Specially to the ones in the metropolitan area who stay working in polls until 7pm and 8pm because of the long lines. Thank you to the volunteers and Bernie supporters in the USA and around the world who crowdfunded for our local campaign. And long live democracy and the political revolution. Viva Bernie. ¡No pasarán! See you in the streets.

Sincerely,
Tania Colón Morales

Co-signers
Luis Alonso Vega
Michelle M. Hidalgo
William Nemcik
Gabriel Coss
Yara Nazario.

https://m.facebook.com/notes/convergencia-por-bernie-sanders/what-happen...