1998 Puerto Rican status referendum

1998 Puerto Rican status referendum
13 December 1998
We, the People, in the searches of the power vested upon us by the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, do hereby firmly petition the Congress of the United States, that with all deliberate haste, and after one hundred years of political subordination, the political condition of the People of Puerto Rico and the scope of the sovereignty of the United States of America be defined in an unequivocal manner in order to resolve the present territorial problem of the island under the following options:
Results
Statehood
 
 46.6%
Independence
 
 2.6%
Free association
 
 0.3%
Territorial commonwealth
 
 0.1%
None of the above
 
 50.5%
Results by municipality

A referendum on the political status of Puerto Rico was held on December 13, 1998, five years after an inconclusive result in a 1993 status referendum.

Five alternatives were listed on the ballot: limited self-government, free association, statehood, sovereignty and none of the above. Disputes arose as to the definition of each of the ballot alternatives; and commonwealth advocates, among others, urged voters to vote for "none of the above", asserting that the commonwealth definition on the ballot "failed to recognize both the constitutional protections afforded to our U.S. citizenship and the fact that the relationship is based upon the mutual consent of Puerto Rico and the United States."

A slim majority of voters (50.5%) voted for the none of the above option.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.