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Puerto Ricans Back Becoming 51st State

posted by n1 on Monday June 12 2017, @09:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the join-the-club dept.

BK writes:

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.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @06:26PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @06:26PM (#524567)

    I counter with Texas exercising it's still-valid right to break into 5 states.

    IANAHistorian, and joking of course.

    Something like that has less of a chance of becoming law then PR becoming a state, so good luck. But if so lets combine the states that are split by cardinal directions like North and South Dakota.

  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday June 12 2017, @06:50PM (1 child)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday June 12 2017, @06:50PM (#524588)

    Something like that has less of a chance of becoming law then PR becoming a state,

    Of course, but I still think it's a good idea. The current state borders make no sense and are merely accidents of history, and end up creating "schizophrenic" states with two very different populations at each others' throats. See Virginia for example; most of the state is Republican and conservative, but the few northern VA counties are Democrat and very liberal, but also extremely populous. Internal divisions like this make state politics a mess and keep things from getting done. The same thing is going on in NY, with NYC vastly different from "upstate". Same in Pennsylvania with Philly. Same in Illinois with Chicago. These cities should be turned into city-states, with their surrounding metro areas joined with them (even if they're in different states; this means New Jersey is eliminated, and maybe CT too). This would also eliminate the problem of people living in one state and working in another, and having the mess of dealing with taxation from two states, plus it'd make public transit better since public transit is always a big mess when it crosses state lines because of political problems.

    The other problem is that states in this country vary too much in population, with each state getting the same 2 Senators. The states should be more roughly equal in population to fix this. So, for instance, if we break NYC and Philly into separate city-states (each combined with half of NJ), NYCS and PhillyS would now have I'm guessing about 10M each, but this would eliminate NYS and PA as the political juggernauts they are. The remainders of NYS and PA would still have plenty of population after this change, since upstate NY still has a bunch of cities (Buffalo, Rochester, Utica, Albany, etc.) as does PA (Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Erie, etc.) and both are geographically large with lots of rural area and small towns. Taking NoVA out of VA would cut it down in population a lot, but they could re-merge with WV to fix that.

    As for ND/SD and NC/SC, that should work for the Dakotas (they're very low-population, the new combined population would be only 1.6M), but not the Carolinas: they're just too large. NC already has 10M, and SC 5M. We don't need a state with 15M people, especially with the already-present acrimony between the RTP area and the rest. Perhaps RTP should combine with Hampton-Roads into a new state, while the rest of NC can combine with SC or maybe northern GA or southwest VA.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @07:04PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @07:04PM (#524599)

      With all the problems we see with gerrymandering I don't trust anyone to draw new state lines based on political reasons.