According to Fox News:
Puerto Rico's governor announced that the U.S. territory has overwhelmingly chosen statehood in a nonbinding referendum Sunday held amid a deep economic crisis that has sparked an exodus of islanders to the U.S. mainland.
Nearly half a million votes were cast for statehood, more than 7,600 for free association/independence and nearly 6,700 for independence, according to preliminary results. The participation rate was just 23 percent with roughly 2.26 million registered voters, leading opponents to question the validity of a vote that several parties had boycotted.
Also covered by AP.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @03:07PM (3 children)
A quick look at the demographics shows that basically every race/ethnicity group is under-represented except Black Americans.
It is interesting to look at the further breakdown by sex, which shows that most non-white groups have a larger proportion of women (presumably due to the lack of white women serving).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/214869/share-of-active-duty-enlisted-women-and-men-in-the-us-military/ [statista.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States#Racial_and_ethnic_categories [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 12 2017, @05:10PM (2 children)
I suppose that we could dig into that, to first find out how accurate the Wiki's numbers are. Then, we could bounce around what all those numbers mean.
Looking at the statista page, it appears that black WOMEN may be over represented. Black men, at 17%, are near the percentage of black men in the US population. I would expect that probably fluctuates slightly from year to year.
Now, taking the quote into context, the article I cited claims that Puerto Ricans are the only group of Hispanics that are over represented in the military. It makes no claim that Hispanics are over represented - it only claims that Puerto Ricans are. All other groups of Hispanics might be UNDER represented, but the Puerto Ricans are grossly over represented, and we would still get a result that shows that ALL Hispanic people are under represented.
I wonder though - why are there almost twice as many black women in the service as we might expect? And, why are there proportionately fewer white women than the other races? Am I interested enough to dig into that question? Hmmmm . . . probably not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @07:28PM
I didn't mean to try to refute your point.
I was simply pointing out that demographic groups being underrepresented in the military seems to be the norm. Specifying that Peurto Ricians are the only Latino group overrepresented needlessly limits their exceptional degree of service to their ethnic group (or tries to paint other Latinos as unpatriotic).
The comment about women was just because the results are so strikingly different.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @08:38PM
Maybe lot of Puerto Ricans fall for the citizenship meme, because they don't realize they have de facto citizen rights?
Who knows.