Sara Márquez Quintero and Ana, both residents of San Juan, are listed as active voters eligible to vote in person in Puerto Rico’s general elections this Tuesday, according to the State Elections Commission (CEE). The CEE also lists Sonia Quiñones Mercado, 90, as a resident of Cabo Rojo who can vote.
However, Sara, Ana, and Sonia are deceased, as confirmed to the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI) by Francisco Ramos Márquez, Sara’s son, the administration of the nursing home listed as Ana’s residence, and Andrea Torres Wiscovitch, Sonia’s granddaughter.

Photo by Omaya Sosa Pascual | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
Meanwhile, according to the registry, Diana, a fictitious name, a 102-year-old resident of Puerto Nuevo, has already voted through early voting. Diana was alive at her residence last week when the CPI attempted to interview her, but she was unaware she had voted or when the elections were. Her children reported that she suffered a stroke in June, resulting in memory issues, yet confirmed she voted. The full names and identities of two of the three centenarian voters visited are not included in this report to protect their privacy, as Diana’s family requested she not be interviewed on record due to her incapacity, and the CPI could not reach a family member of Ana to authorize the use of her personal information.
Torres Wiscovitch, who was among over 4,000 people who filled out an online form created by the CPI to help verify the electoral status of deceased relatives, expressed concern that her grandmother’s vote might be stolen.
“I will check again after these elections,” Torres Wiscovitch said, expressing distrust that her grandmother might appear as having voted in these elections.
Magdalena Santiago Montalvo, who lived in Arecibo, would have turned 102 this month but died in March last year. The CEE still lists her as an active voter for Tuesday’s elections. Her daughter, Noemí Vallés, is outraged that more than a year after her mother’s death, the CEE has not removed her name, believing they do so “because they are thieves who want to steal the elections at all costs.”
In two Arecibo neighborhoods, the homes of Don Ángel and Don Dionisio were occupied by other families. Don Ángel, who would be 101, and Dionisio, who would be 100, remain active in the General Voter Registry despite being deceased.

These cases are just a few of the nearly 6,000 deceased individuals who remain active on electoral lists 24 hours before Tuesday’s elections or who have already illegally voted through early or home voting, either because they were induced to do so or someone else voted for them. The number is higher, as the CPI could only evaluate cases of deceased individuals between 2015 and 2020. The Court Administration or the CEE did not provide lists of mentally incapacitated individuals.
On Monday, CEE alternate president Jessika Padilla acknowledged there are “between 6,000 and 10,000,” though she could not provide an exact number of deceased individuals still active in the Electoral Registry. She added that deceased individuals who remain active in the Electoral Registry should be on salmon-colored exclusion lists available at polling units and consulted by officials on election day.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) requested both figures in a lawsuit before the Court of First Instance. In that lawsuit, the CEE refused to certify that it had removed all deceased individuals from the General Voter Registry used to generate the lists for Tuesday’s elections. The CEE only declared that between 2022 and 2024, it had removed 85,000 deceased from the Registry.
Padilla also could not specify how many mentally incapacitated individuals have been excluded from the lists as required by law, but indicated that voters must have been declared incapacitated by a court. However, former CEE presidents Héctor Conty and Liza García told the CPI that the current home voting manual allows officials to unanimously determine a person’s incapacity to vote or, if there is disagreement, refer to their local board for a decision.
Former PPD representative, independence leader, and former Supreme Court president among “active” deceased voters
The number of deceased and mentally incapacitated individuals who remain active in the Electoral Registry, and who should have been removed before the elections by the CEE’s Exclusions Unit, is uncertain.
On Friday, the CPI reviewed a sample of 1,500 deceased voters on the CEE platform known as Voter Consultation to see if they had been excluded and found over 100 still active, or nearly 7% of the sample. Among them is Héctor Ferrer Ríos, former representative and former president of the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), who died in 2018; and Paquita Pesquera Cantellops, who died in 2022 and was an independence leader and first wife of the founder of the Socialist Party in Puerto Rico, Juan Mari Bras. Also, former Supreme Court president José Andreu García, who died in 2019.
“My God, you’ve left me speechless. I’m outraged, and this clearly demonstrates the CEE’s incapacity and ineptitude. They are showing a total inability to ensure a reliable and accurate vote,” reacted attorney José Andreu Fuentes, son of Andreu García.
“I could say this is all part of a scheme to try to steal the elections. Not having taken measures to prevent this is a tragedy for this country,” the lawyer said.

Representative Héctor Ferrer Santiago, son of Ferrer Ríos, was unaware that his father remained active in the Electoral Registry and told the CPI he would immediately contact the PPD’s electoral commissioner, Karla Angleró, to have him excluded.

Meanwhile, Rosi Mari Pesquera, daughter of Pesquera Cantellops and Mari Bras, also did not know her mother was active. She personally went to the CEE Secretariat last Saturday—with the required documentation—to demand her exclusion from the Registry because she fears her vote might be stolen. However, she was told they could not do it at that moment and to check after the elections to see if the status change occurred.

“It was a waste of time. What I wanted was to deactivate her so they couldn’t use her to vote PNP in these elections,” she said.
Meanwhile, despite the law requiring mentally incapacitated individuals to be removed from the Registry and the Court Administration to inform the CEE quarterly, this does not happen, the ACLU confirmed to the CPI. The number of mentally incapacitated individuals in Puerto Rico is uncertain as there is no updated registry, but figures suggest there are thousands. In the last 10 years alone, the country’s courts have issued about 2,435 incapacity declarations, and the University of Puerto Rico’s Medical Sciences Campus estimates that 116,000 people on the island suffer from Alzheimer’s disease or dementia.
In September, a CPI investigation revealed that the CEE maintained the personal information of over 900,000 deceased voters in the General Voter Registry, which was provided to parties for their electoral activities. This included voters in excluded, inactive, and active categories. Among the active, nearly 6,000 deceased individuals from 2015 to 2021 were found using mortality records from those years. The CPI could not determine how many deceased voters before 2015 remained active ahead of the elections because the Demographic Registry did not provide the requested data for those years.
The investigation also revealed that in Puerto Rico’s elections, the traditional majority parties, the New Progressive Party and the Popular Democratic Party, have used various vote-stealing methods rooted in the misuse of this Registry’s information, including identity theft of deceased individuals and people living outside Puerto Rico, list clearing at polling stations on election day, and abuse of special voting for bedridden and elderly adults. Following the publication, dozens of cases of these types of vote theft have been reported by citizens and members of the PPD and the Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana, including requests for early voting ballots in the names of people living in the United States who were unaware, and a citizen with Alzheimer’s disease.
Journalists Jeniffer Wiscovitch Padilla and Wilma Maldonado Arrigoitía contributed to this story.
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