Five months before the elections, Governor Wanda Vázquez (PNP) signed the 2020 Law 58, making way for a new version of Puerto Rico’s Electoral Code. The law authored by former Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz caused confusion about the correct way to vote.
Efforts to practice the ballot saw high volumes of users.
For example, practicatuvoto.com, a platform that has been available to practice the vote saw its users double compared to the 2016 elections. In 2020, the website received 465,340 total users and 841,834 practice sessions.
“What we’re seeing is that with each election, people in Puerto Rico want more opportunities to learn and have control over their vote,” said software engineer Carlos J. Vélez Álvarez who has been leading practicatuvoto.com as a volunteer since 2008.
The platform hasn’t changed much since its origins. Vélez Álvarez created a program that extracts the names and positions of the CEE PDFs and each year they update the ballots once they’re published. He says the support of the press has been instrumental for their success and getting people to the platform.
Vélez Álvarez welcomes new initiatives and was in communication with the emerging platform paravotar.org/practice, a portal that allowed voters to practice their vote and access other information like their nearest voting center. By Election Day, the page had received 407,000 website visits and the tool to practice the vote was used 217, 674 times.
One of their main motivators for the platform was to show people the alternatives to straight-party voting, according to Layshi Curbelo, UX designer and spokesperson for paravotar.org.
“We know ballots are designed for straight-party voting because it’s the easiest way, but we want to explain that there are other ways to cast your ballot that are available and easy to do. You simply have to practice them,” she emphasized before the elections.
Paravotar.org was an initiative under the umbrella of Code4PuertoRico, a non-profit made up of programmers and designers. Curbelo alongside Emmanuel Luciano Bernal and José Padilla Malavé created the website voluntarily without any compensation.
The Electoral Code was passed solely with the votes of the pro-statehood party and did not have the support of civic organizations or citizens. Schatz and other members of the party emphasized the straight party vote throughout his reelection campaign.