Status vote, November 5, 2024

On November 5, 2024 Puerto Rico voted among three non-territorial options: statehood, independence, and sovereignty in free association. The current territorial status was not a column. Press reports of the CEE certification issued in January 2025 give statehood 620,782 votes, 58.61 percent of valid votes; sovereign free association 313,259 votes, 29.57 percent; independence 125,171 votes, 11.82 percent. About 181,200 ballots were left blank. This build did not open the certified CEE PDF; those figures follow the published coverage of that certification.

Early machine counts swapped the independence and free association columns. The certification corrected the swap. A lesson that printed the swapped pair would be wrong. The certified order is statehood, then free association, then independence, of the valid votes. The blank ballots are not nothing. Opposition parties had called for blanks. Print the blanks alongside the valid-vote percentages so the menu is honest.

Congress, as of the freeze date, had not admitted a state on the back of 2024. The pattern of the last four votes is a statehood lead on different menus, with turnout, blanks, and boycotts as the arguments around the lead. This diary will not turn 2024 into a legal admission. It will print the published certified portions and stop. A later PDF scan may substitute the press-reported figures if it differs.

Soberanía en libre asociación, sovereignty in free association. Independencia, independence, without that association. Estadidad, statehood. Three futures, no ELA column. That design is why a Free Associated State voter had to choose a non-territorial option, leave the ballot blank, or annul it. The design, again, is part of the count.

Honesty: November 5, 2024. The certified CEE PDF was not opened in this build. As ordinarily published from the January 2025 certification reports: statehood 58.61 percent of valid votes, free association 29.57, independence 11.82, plus a large count of blanks. If those figures come up 404 in a later audit, discard them and keep the date and the three options. Do not invent a fourth percentage to fill a hole.

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 on this page do not support. The English terms are glossed in the text so that the statute can be read without a manifesto.

Sources: Elecciones en Puerto Rico, 5 de noviembre de 2024; Informe de Primera Hora sobre la certificación de la CEE, 18 de enero de 2025. Freeze 2026-08-22.