Elections in Puerto Rico, the first Internet website dedicated to studying the Island's election processes, was launched on July 30, 1995 from my personal space at the University of Pittsburgh - where I worked at the time - with statistics from the 1992 general election, the 1993 status plebiscite, and the 1994 referendum on amendments to the Constitution of Puerto Rico, in addition to reference materials about the Puerto Rican electoral process.

The publication of this site, developed on my spare time and without any kind of budget, was announced on USENET - in soc.culture.puerto-rico - on the day of its launching. Two days later, Zeydy Ortiz-Laureano, at the time editor of the Puerto Rico FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions), sent me an e-mail message to inform me that she wished to mention my site on her on-line publication, which I immediately agreed to: this distinction allowed parties interested in the subject to know about the existence of the site.

In fact, when I began developing this site in 1995, there was no Puerto Rico election data available on the Internet: although the Commonwealth Elections Commission of Puerto Rico (CEE) had broadcast the results of the 1993 status plebiscite and the 1994 referendum over the University of Puerto Rico-managed BORIKEN electronic mailing list, these had been temporary arrangements, limited to the dissemination of election results to the list's subscribers on the night of these events. Until the inauguration of La Fortaleza's (the governor's residence) official site in early 1996, there were no Puerto Rico government websites: the Commonwealth Elections Commission would not have a permanent presence on the Internet until October 1996, when a private company set up a website on behalf of the agency.

In the meantime, I continued to work on this site, which began to be published in both English and Spanish in August 1995. In late 1995 and early 1996, the site was substantially expanded with the publication of an archive of past election results.

Starting with the 1996 general election, the Commonwealth Elections Commission began to furnish me a substantial amount of election materials for publication on this site. This way, I was able to publish on this site the complete results of the 1996 general election, and also expand other sections of the site. Later on, in May 1998, I developed the election maps presentation.

In recognition to the contribution made by this site to the on-line dissemination of detailed information about Puerto Rico's election processes, the then-Chairman of the Commonwealth Elections Commission honored me with an invitation to observe the December 13, 1998 status plebiscite vote, as well as to participate - directly from the Commission's operations center in Hato Rey, Puerto Rico - in the transmission over the Internet of the vote results, which were available on this site beginning at 5:00 PM AST on the day of the event.

The year 1999 brought significant changes to Elections in Puerto Rico. In April, it moved to its own address, at ElectionsPuertoRico.org and EleccionesPuertoRico.org, which allowed a comprehensive reorganization of the site, and later on, in May, the institution of the election results lookup system. These improvements simplified access to the vast amount of materials available here, which were expanded in September with the addition of the full Spanish-language text of the Puerto Rico Election Law.

In November 1999, the Commonwealth Elections Commission hired me to develop the agency's official website. I returned to Puerto Rico to work at the Commission, where from 2000 to 2003 I continued in an official capacity the work started here twelve years ago. While I continued to publish this website during the years I worked for the Commission, some sections originally instituted here, such as the election results lookup system, were reproduced (with slight modifications) on the agency's website.

The Sunday, February 9, 2003, edition of the (Spanish-language) newspaper El Nuevo Día featured a full-page article about my work on the Commission's site (as well as on this site), under the title "Deslumbra el sitio virtual de la CEE" ("Dazzling CEE virtual site"), but I resigned as Project Manager for the Commonwealth Elections Commission later that year. Although there was a proposal that entailed continuing as the agency's Webmaster (to which I had not resigned), nothing came out of it, and since then many of the innovations I introduced on the agency's website have been either abandoned or continued only sporadically, which has brought about strong criticism from some news media outlets. For example, in the first half of 2004 the team of programmers in charge of the Commission's main website since mid-2003 - a job I used to do all by myself - neglected to update master file summary and age and gender voter registration statistics. This situation persisted until it was denounced in Radio Isla 1320's well known political analysis program Fuego Cruzado ("Crossfire"). In a matter of days the updated statistics were published on the Commission's website. However, since the 2004 general election those figures have not been updated on the agency's website, not even for the July 10, 2005 referendum.

In fact, following the 2005 referendum, on the July 11, 2005 edition of Fuego Cruzado, one of the program's regular analysts, Mr. Adolfo Krans, criticized (among other things) the Commission's main website presentation, which according to him showed "lack of supervision at certain levels". In the systems area, Mr. Krans felt the Commission should have published:

"...an aggressive, ambitious site that must be directed at a given moment towards concentrating information for voters. That is, there's historical data there that if you have to minimize for the moment and take it out to give more, more agility to the site, you can do it. That is, there is...there is an absence of agility that ought to be looked at, ought to be looked at."

I may add that from time to time I have received comments from visitors to Elections in Puerto Rico who have let me know that they have come to my site because they cannot find the information they are looking for at the Commission's website: in some cases the information is available there as well, but often it is difficult to find it.

Unfortunately, the Commision's website has increasingly focused on bureaucratic-administrative matters - such as the agency's day-care center - which are important to some CEE employees, but completely irrelevant to the general public.

By the way, I refer to the Commission's main website because since mid-2003 a private company from the Dominican Republic develops the election night and canvass (or recount) Web presentations for major election events, such as the 2003 local primaries, the 2004 general election and the 2005 referendum, which are published on separate servers. Incidentally, these presentations have had their own problems as well: both in 2003 and in 2004 these crashed early on election night, remaining practically inaccessible until well into the following day, leaving Internet users without access to extremely important information about the results of these transcendental election events. As if that were not enough, since early 2007 the server used to publish results of the aforementioned events has been offline, effectively crippling the agency's website.

(Shortly after the latter deficiency was pointed out here - and perhaps by coincidence - the CEE added 2004 election figures to its main website; however, that presentation - very limited and of poor quality when compared to the previous 2004 election results website - doesn't even have final results, but instead outdated election night preliminary totals, which in some cases show as winners candidates who were ultimately defeated in the vote recount held afterwards.)

Although the CEE's website still has modified versions of the election results lookup systems I originally developed and published here, these have not been updated since 2001. However, that has not prevented a Commission employee, who was in charge of the agency's website after my resignation, to falsely claim on the website of an educational institution that he was the person who developed and published them: in the legal community, this is known as false representation.

Given the existing dissatisfaction with the CEE's website, I have decided to continue developing this site. In the summer of 2004, I redesigned Elections in Puerto Rico to institute a new presentation style on this site, based on the design I originally introduced in 2002 for Election Resources on the Internet / Recursos Electorales en la Internet. Later on I published here a comparison of voter registration statistics for the 2004 general election versus the 2000 general election. This site was the first to report a decline in the total number of registered voters with respect to the 2000 election - a fact the Commonwealth Elections Commission had to acknowledge almost immediately. I should note as well that El Nuevo Día reprinted with my authorization both the text of the voter registration statistics comparative analysis as well as materials from the 2002 Senate and House districts reapportionment section in a "¡Cómo Votar!" ("How to Vote!") supplement published on Saturday, October 30, 2004.

For the 2004 election I also published maps of precincts assigned to at-large legislative candidates. Interestingly, as a result of this publication several errors surfaced in the sample ballots issued by the Commonwealth Elections Commission, which had not been detected by the agency up to that point.

Although Elections in Puerto Rico cannot be a substitute of the Commonwealth Elections Commission's website - as set forth by the Puerto Rico Electoral Law, one of the duties of the Chairman of the Commission is educating and informing the Puerto Rican elector and the political parties with regard to their rights and obligations, for which purpose he may use all available communications media and public information techniques, among them the Internet - this site houses a significant amount of materials that are not available anywhere else on the Web. Therefore, I have continued publishing it as a personal contribution I am making as a non-profit, free public service for the benefit of the people of Puerto Rico as well as mankind in general.

Manuel Álvarez-Rivera
July 30, 2007