Citizen Victory Movement Rep. Mariana Nogales Molinelli
By THE STAR STAFF
Citizen Victory Movement Rep. Mariana Nogales Molinelli confirmed on Thursday that State Elections Commission Alternate Chairwoman Jessika Padilla Rivera agreed to begin the recount of ballots for the position of at-large representative.
Nogales, who did not appear on the official ballot but campaigned as a write-in candidate, celebrated the decision and expressed that justice is being done to the voters who cast their vote in that way.
In an interview with Metro Puerto Rico, Nogales expressed her satisfaction with the recognition of the votes in question.
“We are very happy because the right thing is being done and, above all, because justice is being done to the people who cast the votes by direct nomination and who had to go through that additional work,” she said.
When questioned about Padilla Rivera’s assertion that even if Nogales obtained all the votes by direct nomination, mathematically it would not be enough to lift the candidate into the 10th position, the legislator disagreed.
“We think that the alternate chairperson’s position is very limited, since those approximately 29,000 votes are those that the machine was able to read and the votes of the people who made cross-checks and the machine could not read them, and the people who did not make cross-checks but did write their name, are not counted,” she argued.
Nogales stressed that there are some 100,000 ballots marked as not voted, voted blank or voted incorrectly, and that many of them could contain valid votes that have not yet been counted.
“In addition, we have a [quantity] of absentee ballots and early votes that could also contain votes by direct nomination,” she said.
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