Island residents and the presidency

The people who live in Puerto Rico do not vote for the president of the United States in the November general election. The Electoral College is built from states and from the District of Columbia under the Twenty-Third Amendment. Puerto Rico is not a state and is not the District. The National Archives' Electoral College FAQ is the public page. Article II and the Twelfth Amendment are the constitutional floor. Residents of the island who move to a state can vote there like any other citizen.

Party primaries are another machine. The national parties have, in various years, held presidential primaries or caucuses on the island. A primary delegate is not an elector. This lesson will not pretend that a Democratic or Republican primary is the suffrage of the general election. It is party business. The November vote for electors is the right this page talks about, and the island does not have it.

Jones-Shafroth made citizens. Selective Service made citizens draftable. Balzac said that citizenship was not incorporation. The presidency lesson is the same pattern in civic form. One can be a citizen, serve in the armed forces, and still lack a vote for the commander in chief while residing on the island. This lesson's date anchor, March 29, 1961, is the ratification of the Twenty-Third Amendment for the District of Columbia, the day Washington, D.C. gained electors and Puerto Rico still did not. It is a date of contrast, not a Puerto Rico statute.

Voto presidencial, presidential vote. Electores, electors, the people who actually cast the constitutional votes. Residents of the island do not choose those electors. Residents of a state do. That is the whole distinction. Campaign rallies on the island can be loud. They mint no electors.

Honesty: residents of the island do not vote for the president. Citizens, yes. Electors, no, not from the island. Moving to a state changes the rule because the rule follows residence in a state, not blood. No invented share of "electors that would have been." The Archives page and the Constitution suffice. Lesson 29 is the citizenship clause people confuse with this one.

The numbered finding stays with the public law, the rubric, or the tally. This lesson invents no percentage, no count of people, and no date that the sources of this page do not support. English terms are glossed in the text so that the statute can be read without a manifesto.

Sources: Archivos Nacionales, preguntas frecuentes del Colegio Electoral; Constitución de los EE. UU., Artículo II y Enmienda XII. Freeze 2026-08-22.