Ballot containers appearing. Ballot containers to be looked for.
Ballots counted. Ballots uncounted.
Votes adjudicated. Votes unadjudicated.
Tallied records. Untallied records.
“Winning” candidates certified. Winning candidates uncertified.
Fraud knocks at the door. Some are willing to let it in.
A leaderless State Elections Commission (CEE) — controlled at all levels by the ruling political party under the new Electoral Code — looks the other way. Silence from most of the Court.
An illegitimate government, the outcome?
-Associate Justice Ángel Colón Pérez, Dissenting opinion in Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana vs. Miguel Romero, Supreme Court of Puerto Rico
November 23, 2020

Florencio Fernández Martínez and Ana María Demorizi Castillo ‘voted’ in 2020 and 2016, respectively, according to records from the State Elections Commission (CEE, in Spanish). But this is impossible.

Florencio, 95, has lived in the Dominican Republic since 2010 and has not voted in Puerto Rico since 2008. His wife,   Ana, who would have been 90 today, died in 2011 — five years before a vote was cast in her name. Documents provided by their relatives corroborate this information. The Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI) verified the votes attributed to both in the CEE’s online Voter Inquiry platform. Both still appear active in the General Register of Voters (RGE), to which the CPI had access.

Their cases are not isolated but part of a pattern well known among the electoral structures of the two major parties, the New Progressive Party (PNP), the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), and the CEE, where personal data of deceased voters, elderly individuals, or those living abroad is used to commit electoral fraud in Puerto Rico, the CPI found.

The investigation, which included an analysis of data from the Puerto Rico General Register of Voters (RGE in Spanish) and interviews with some twenty CEE sources from all political parties, as well as a review of hundreds of documents, found that at least 5,872 voters who died between 2015 and September 30, 2020, remained active in the RGE, meaning they voted in either the 2020 or 2016 elections.

In the RGE, more than 2,865 active voters would be over 100 years old, some with birth dates in the 1800s. The CPI reviewed a sample of 450 records of these voters in the CEE’s Voter Inquiry platform and, as of last Friday, found that fewer than 2% — only eight of them — had been excluded due to death. The others remained active, including a dozen born between 1828 and 1850, who, according to the CEE, voted in the 2020 general elections. One of them, a resident of Luquillo who would be 174 years old today, was “reactivated” to vote in 2020, according to the platform.

The RGE database contains 682,938 active or inactive voters over the age of 80, when, according to the 2023 Census Community Survey, only 221,216 persons of that age group live in Puerto Rico. The CPI found that 155,611 people in the Electoral Register died between 2015 and 2022 after cross-referencing RGE data with death records from the Demographic Registry.

The CPI could not analyze deaths before 2015 or in 2023, as the Demographic Registry refused to release these data despite a legal battle that has been ongoing in Puerto Rican courts for nearly a year.

When asked how many deceased individuals are in the Electoral Register, the alternate president of the CEE, Jessika Padilla Rivera, said she could not specify but assured that there shouldn’t be more than the 16,000 deaths reported by the Demographic Registry for 2023. However, the CPI's analysis determined that the RGE, which contains the personal data of nearly 5 million voters, includes almost 900,000 deceased individuals identified as active, inactive, or excluded voters still in the register.

Padilla Rivera acknowledged in an interview with the CPI that, although the CEE's Exclusions Unit regularly purges the Voter Register, there is a backlog they hope to resolve before the November 5 elections. She attributed the delay to the fact that the Demographic Registry's platform changed and no longer communicates with the CEEs, causing a year-long delay.

In just three days, the CPI confirmed, through the CEE's Voter Inquiry platform, that many of the deceased individuals still appearing in the Electoral Register and listed as having voted in the 2020 elections had died before 2023. This confirms that the issue is not due to the 2023 delay, as Padilla Rivera claimed.

The CPI obtained RGE data shared with party commissioners through a source who requested anonymity due to the CEE’s refusal to release the information. The CPI verified through sampling that the data matched those on the CEE’s Voter Inquiry page. 

“It is unacceptable to tamper with the electoral participation of the elderly and deceased. These actions not only corrupt the electoral process but also erode public trust in our institutions,” said Anadys Félix Fernández, granddaughter of the Fernández Demorizi couple, whose family is preparing to file the corresponding actions to start an investigation.

This vote-rigging involving the deceased is just one of many potential forms of electoral fraud that political operatives have been executing for more than two decades in Puerto Rico, falsifying endorsements and votes, and using personal RGE data to benefit candidates and clear out lists at polling stations on election day, according to testimony and documents consulted by the CPI. According to sources close to the institution, the CEE has never had the capacity, nor the will, to audit the issuance and management of these documents.

The “list clearing” method involves using the RGE or party membership records to conduct fraudulent transactions in the name of voters, such as endorsing candidates or requesting special voting options to then cast fraudulent votes.

This scheme ends up counting thousands of votes from “bedridden” citizens who can walk, mentally incapacitated adults, and dead people who would be up to 196 years old today yet appear in the CEE system as having voted in the last three election cycles, according to documents and data obtained by the CPI.

Although the 2020 Electoral Code establishes the confidentiality of the RGE, the statute also allows the CEE to determine “which Register data can be disclosed” while keeping “confidential others that can be used to verify voter identity.” In practice, candidates and hundreds of sympathizers who make up the so-called “electoral structure” of political parties have access to citizens’ personal information, and some have leaked it.

There are even “agents” who, with the Electoral Register in hand, help political candidates collect the endorsements needed to validate their candidacy and handle requests for early voting, according to a half-dozen testimonials from people with direct knowledge, as well as complaints and lawsuits the CPI reviewed. Six sources who spoke to the CPI about this practice confirmed that some agents forge voter signatures and charge candidates for collecting endorsement signatures.

The “agents” sell their services “for a small fee” to candidates to collect endorsements as early as the primary, said one of four sources from three of the five registered political parties. Ultimately, their work translates into a hybrid endorsement project in which actual signatures are taken in person from the voter, but they also resort to emptying voter lists.

“These agents are ‘creatures of the CEE’ because they worked there and knew the personnel who provided them with the information first,” explained the same source. 

Likewise, the CEE allows the massive delivery of advance voting applications, even though Article 9.38. of the Electoral Code prohibits it. It states: “All Advance Vote applications shall be submitted individually, one for each Voter. Grouped applications shall not be accepted.”

The problem of list manipulation and clearing the lists in polling stations is so well known that the Electoral Code mentions it as a practice to be avoided.

How the Scheme Works

One of the sources — linked to the PPD — explained that this “list clearing” to complete the required number of endorsements is not done by one person copying names from the Electoral Register “on a large scale,” but instead involves “many people” organized at the municipal, precinct, and neighborhood levels, using lists extracted from the Electoral Register and party affiliate lists for this practice.

A person familiar with the internal processes of the PNP and PPD explained under the condition of anonymity that another form of fraud occurs when a neighbor knows that a family in the area “moved to Orlando, for example, so I endorse [a candidate] on their behalf, request early voting [for them], and ask for the ballot, and then keep an eye on the mailbox [to collect the envelope containing the ballots], and I use it.”

There is also the practice where a nursing home administrator “votes for everyone in the entire facility,” the source added.

The source also indicated that fraudulent voting schemes are executed in hospitals and prisons through the intervention of political supporters.

“These are complex and large schemes,” the source explained.

“What’s serious about this is that these are long-term care institutions where people cannot care for themselves. Most are people who have lost their mental capacity or judgment. People who don’t have the mental capacity aren’t supposed to vote,” said the Ombudsperson for the Elderly, Carmen Delia Sánchez Salgado.

“They definitely take advantage,” she added.

She said that of the 900 such institutions, with more than 20,000 residents exposed to these situations in Puerto Rico, employees do not file complaints for fear of losing their jobs.

However, the most significant list-clearing scheme occurs on Election Day during the ballot count when, according to a PNP insider, officials from the other parties get tired and go home.

“They grab the infamous lists of deceased or those who didn’t show up on Election Day, clear the lists, and fill out the ballots,” the insider explained.

They pointed out that in the PNP, they know that there are deceased individuals still active on the lists and, in their opinion, they keep them there to operate the scheme. They assured that the dynamics within the PPD are the same.

An example of list clearing during an electoral event occurred in Villalba during the PPD primaries in 2012. That day, two polling officials, also employees of the Municipal Legislature, cleared lists to favor candidates for the Legislative Assembly. They did the clearing during the ballot count in the room while someone watched the door, as revealed in a legal process in which the officials pleaded guilty.

In this way, electoral processes — and democracy — are manipulated from the start and the registration of potential candidates up to the outcome of general elections. This happens in plain sight of the CEE's leadership, but the legal or administrative consequences have been scarce, according to four sources from the PNP and PPD who have worked at the institution.

The CEE has never been able to validate the thousands of endorsement signatures submitted by alleged voters, admitted Eduardo Nieves Cartagena, director of the CEE's Office of Information Systems and Electronic Processing (OSIPE), and the agency's deputy director, Aníbal Zambrana, in an interview with the CPI.

Both officials stated that now, with the Registro Electrónico de Electores (Electronic Voters Registry or eRE) system, some oversight will be possible for the first time because the system sends text messages and emails to citizens when a transaction is made in their name. However, they acknowledged that this oversight must come from the citizens, who must file complaints. At the time of publication of this story, only 5% of the 1.9 million eligible voters had registered on the electronic platform, and more than half of those registrations were pending review.

The CPI requested an interview with Justice Secretary Domingo Emanuelli to hear the reasons for the lack of investigation and prosecution of electoral crimes. The official declined, issuing a written statement limited to just saying that the Public Integrity Division has five active investigations, without providing further details.

Although using information from the Electoral Register for legally unauthorized purposes is a serious electoral offense, this data is being trafficked — as seen in recent cases involving attorney Mayra López Mulero, journalist David Cordero Mercado, prosecutor Emmanuel Estrada, and residents of a nursing home in Miramar, San Juan. However, the Department of Justice has not prosecuted any cases related to these incidents. Pedro Cardona Roig, a candidate for representative from the Citizen Victory Movement (MVC), filed complaints with the CEE, the Department of Justice, and the FBI regarding incidents at the Miramar nursing home.

In the case of López Mulero, the CEE president dismissed Carmen Vázquez Fraguada, an employee of the Permanent Registration Board (JIP) in San Juan, who shared the commentator’s personal information in a WhatsApp group named “Pnp,” which included officials and supporters of the party. The celebrity lawyer and media analyst also filed a complaint with the FBI.

MVC representatives filed the complaint at the CEE, the Department of Justice, and the FBI

regarding the request for personal data, eRE usernames and passwords, and email addresses from elderly adults at the Miramar nursing home by political mobilizers for Mayor Miguel Romero — who, according to Cardona Roig, falsely claimed to be CEE employees wearing CEE shirts and ID cards —. The person leading the group involved in the incident with elderly adults at the nursing home was identified as Francisco Cabello Domínguez, a lawyer who lost his license after pleading guilty in 2003 to 20 counts, including illegal appropriation, possession, and falsification of documents.

The complaints the CPI verified showed that, in 2001, Cabello Domínguez sent a letter to more than a dozen taxpayers, forging the signature of the Assistant Secretary of Internal Revenue at the Department of Treasury. He also imitated the department’s received stamp to misappropriate 15 checks made out to the Secretary of the Treasury by individuals and institutions seeking accreditation for pension plans. Though he was charged with misappropriating public funds — a crime that mandates prison time — his guilty plea resulted in a probationary sentence due to an agreement with the prosecution.

The CEE's Complaints Examination Committee considers two complaints and an investigation request. According to the CEE, the two complaints are for distributing electoral propaganda, and the investigation involves a nursing home in the eastern region of the island over the possible misuse of electoral data. The complaint filed by López Mulero was also referred to that committee. Additionally, there is a complaint related to a nursing home in Miramar and a grievance against PNP  Rep. Wanda Del Valle Correa, who allegedly used her local legislative office as a Temporary Registration Board. If the full Commission accepts the investigations, they will be referred to the Complaints Examination Committee.

Doctors for Hire

A case presented by then PPD Commissioner Guillermo San Antonio Acha in 2016, which was appealed to the Supreme Court by then and current PNP Commissioner Aníbal Vega Borges, clearly details the scheme to capture the votes of so-called “bedridden” individuals, those with mobility problems who require home voting services.

The report prepared by Judge Aileen Navas Auger, appointed by the Supreme Court as a special commissioner in this case, reveals a scheme to secure the votes of hundreds of bedridden individuals who can walk, and mentally incapacitated people, who were certified to cast early votes by doctors associated with the PNP and the organization Servidores Públicos Progresistas (Progressive Public Servants).

Navas Auger held two days of hearings and, in a 36-page report, detailed by name the 788 voters affected by this scheme. The document also identified the doctors involved, two of whom were employees of the Puerto Rico State Insurance Fund Corporation, who claimed to have visited up to 80 patients in two or three hours to assess their mobility. All the doctors involved admitted that they did not know the patients and were not their primary care doctors, as required by law. They were approached and directed by PNP operatives, who gave them “a list” of voters to visit and the route to follow.

For the 2016 elections, it was necessary to prove, with a certificate signed by the primary care physician, that the voter required home voting access because it would be impossible or very difficult for them to travel to the polling station on election day due to health conditions. With the approval of the 2020 new Electoral Code, requiring documents or certifications was prohibited (Article 9.38). Now, voters only need to mark on the early voting application that they wish to vote from home. The voter’s signature on that document acts as an oath or declaration that the voter belongs to the categories eligible for this type of vote.

In a split decision (five to four), with four dissenting justices, including the PNP-appointed Judge Roberto Feliberti Cintrón — who aligned with the three PPD justices — the Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of Judge Navas Auger’s report or the merits of the case. The Court's decision was based on a procedural issue: the lack of evidence that voters whose votes were to be invalidated in the 2016 elections had been given adequate notice. Justices Mildred Pabón Charneco, Luis Estrella Martínez, Rafael Martínez Torres, Edgardo Rivera García, and Erick Kolthoff ordered that the potentially fraudulent votes be counted.

“There are many cases. This has turned into a situation where the best cheater wins,” said former PPD Electoral Commissioner Guillermo San Antonio Acha in an interview. “The mentality has been created that if you're not caught, it doesn’t matter. The electoral system cannot function based on the idea that the more votes you steal, the more you win,” he added.

Like Bees to Honey, Politicians Chase Early Voting

With a population of nearly 950,000 — or 31% of residents — who are 60 years old or older, it is unsurprising that political parties and candidates go to great lengths to ensure that elderly voters maintain their active electoral status and secure their votes. Nearly 1.3 million voters participated in Puerto Rico’s 2020 general elections. A recent resolution established that all active voters aged 60 and over can request early voting in the November 5 general elections.

The electoral commissioner for the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), Roberto Iván Aponte Berríos, said using mail-in voting due to age has been abused. The Electoral Code allows early voting for those voters who swear that they face barriers or difficulties in attending their polling station.

“The Governor of Puerto Rico, who has been photographed running and walking, said he would request a mail-in vote because he’s over 60. He has no mobility issues. That’s illegal; he cannot request it,” Aponte Berríos said as an example of the lax way in which mail-in voting was requested.

Given the hundreds of applications he or his team has submitted to the Permanent Registration Board (JIP) and the CEE headquarters in Hato Rey, New Progressive Party representative Georgie Navarro has declared himself the poster child for early voting. A complaint was filed with the CEE because, as a candidate, Navarro personally delivered these applications, even though political campaigning at JIPs is prohibited. In a video posted on his social media, Navarro said this was an effort from “the entire party, collecting this across Puerto Rico.”

“We do this every four years: in 2020, and now again,” Navarro said on television. “If you don’t have the structure, if you don’t have the data of the people, you can’t get them,” he added, showing an index card with his campaign logo where he asks voters for their name, electoral number, email, password, the last four digits of their Social Security number, security questions, and the answers to those questions for registering in the eRE system.

Personal data, like those collected by Romero and Navarro’s teams, are enough for anyone to request an early vote, receive a ballot by email, and vote on someone else’s behalf, confirmed OSIPE Director Eduardo Nieves Cartagena in an interview.

When the CPI asked if a person could create and misuse an eRE profile in someone else’s name using the username and password, Nieves Cartagena said this “is true” but argued that with the new system, there is greater visibility of potential fraud than when endorsements and early votes were handled exclusively “on paper.”

“Now, someone files a complaint, and I have [the information],” he said.

Attorney Juan Manuel Frontera Suau, the electoral commissioner for Project Dignity, told the CPI that early voting raises significant concerns because he believes the CEE cannot properly handle the high volume of requests and votes. He stated that during the 2020 elections, more than 100,000 of these requests were for home voting. Still, the officials from the majority parties, instead of following the routes designated by the official CEE list, “had their own little list on the side,” to secure votes that benefited their party, even if they had not been approved for home voting.

“[Mail-in voting] is the most concerning vote because it’s the only vote in which you never see the voter: you don’t see them when they request it, you don’t see them when they vote, and you don’t see them when they send it… It’s a vote in which it’s easier to commit fraud,” Frontera Suau affirmed.

The PIP electoral commissioner agreed that mail-in voting is “impossible to monitor” because there is never certainty that the person who requested (the ballot) is the voter or that someone else used their electoral information to cast a vote in their name.

In total, the CEE received more than 270,000 special vote requests for this election cycle, including various forms of early, absentee, and easy-access voting, the institution's secretary, Rolando Cuevas Colón, stated during a House of Representatives hearing last Thursday. More than 200,000 of these requests were for early voting, of which only 52,758 had been reviewed and validated by that day.

Padilla Rivera stated in that same hearing that the remaining applications had to be validated by September 24 by about 61 employees of the Early and Absentee Voting Board (JAVAA), the CEE division in charge of reviewing and adjudicating these votes. If they worked 16 hours a day without stopping and only doing this task, these employees would have approximately two minutes to review and validate the identity and data of each voter in these applications.

For former PNP Electoral Commissioner Edwin Mundo, securing early votes is crucial for candidates and political parties because it guarantees votes in advance. The voter has several days from when they receive the ballot to submit their vote, whereas “Election Day is just one day, and if you arrive to pick up the voter [to take them to a polling station], and they are sick [and unable to go], you lose that vote.”

He explained that mail-in voting reduces the workload for parties in mobilizing voters to polling stations on Election Day. Traditionally, in Puerto Rico, most parties have workgroups dedicated to finding and transporting their affiliates to polling stations in buses and vehicles that they try to have readily available.

Mundo assured that, in assisting with early voting application submissions, the PNP teams only help those who are sure to vote for their party or its candidates.

“You’re not going to go after PPD votes. You’re going after yours,” said the former New Progressive Party representative. “Everyone is working to win. It’s like basketball; you’re not going to shoot the ball into the other team’s basket,” he added.

Caught in Their Own Trap

In these often-desperate searches for votes and endorsements for candidates, those attempting to commit fraud sometimes get caught in their own trap. This is what Nelsa López Colón, widow of former Governor Rafael Hernández Colón, alleges. Her name was used to endorse the candidacy of Elmer Román, who sought to become the PNP’s candidate for Resident Commissioner. She denounced it in a complaint that, more than seven months after it was filed, remains unresolved.

The mistake of the endorsement collector, Abimael Hernández Calderón, was that López Colón is the step-grandmother of Pablo José Hernández Rivera, who is running for Resident Commissioner for the PPD. López Colón said a “false signature” was submitted in her name and that the person who did it also falsely certified that they knew her.

In her complaint, López Colón warned that the falsification of the endorsement “demonstrates unacceptable failures in the protection of the confidentiality of personal voter data” and “an unacceptable vulnerability in the Commission's digital platform.” PPD Commissioner Karla Angleró González said last Friday that she suspects Hernández Calderón currently works at the JAVAA division of the CEE and asked the Alternate (acting) President to clarify this.

Endorsement collectors use data from the RGE. The register contains more than 800 information fields for all Puerto Rican voters. By law, the CEE must provide an extract of it to the Electoral Commissioners of each party. This extract contains only 25 fields of information for each voter, including their full name, electoral number, mother’s and father’s names, address, and phone number, Nieves Cartagena told the CPI. All parties have access to the personal information of all registered voters, even if they are not affiliated with them. The CPI confirmed that this data is copied onto external memory devices and screenshots and widely circulated among political operatives.

The Alternate President of the CEE stated in an interview with the CPI that she could not prevent accusations of electoral fraud from arising before or during the election event, but she would respond promptly. When asked if she could guarantee a fraud-free election on November 5, she said:

“The word guarantee is what everyone seeks, and it’s the word I’d truly like to say. This president is committed to conducting an election event with transparency, with all the guarantees the Electoral Code provides us.” 

Adriana M. Quiles González and Valeria Santos Dávila contributed to this story.