Puerto Rico recently voted on its commonwealth status, which reportedly found many Puerto Ricans in favor of statehood. This has led many to start asking: Will Puerto Rico become the 51st state? Not likely, says the Huffington Post.
As the U.S. colonized Puerto Rico in 1898, Puerto Ricans have voted several times on whether to become a state or not, but the idea has never taken hold with the majority.
Even with the recent vote, the referendum’s results are a bit misleading. The referendum itself consisted of two questions. First, it asked voters if they wanted to keep their current U.S. commonwealth status. Fifty-two percent of those voted “no.” The referendum then asked voters if they wanted to become a U.S. state, an independent country or a freely associated state, which would be a type of independent state in close alliance with the U.S. Sixty-one percent of those who answered the second question chose statehood.
But more than 470,000 voters intentionally left the question blank, meaning only 45 percent of those casting ballots support statehood.
“The media in the United States have really taken it the other way, that statehood won, and that’s not true,” historian Angel Collado-Schwartz told the Huffington Post.
Even without a majority, the results will be given to the Congress and the White House, which will decide whether to launch the process of turning Puerto Rico into to the 51st state in the union. [Latina]