You do realize their govonor was a republican who was just overthrown by an indepentent right?

The Republicans supported Puerto Rican Statehood in their Presidential Platform.

So please do at least a bare minium of research before making ridiculious statements flaming  a political party.

Republicans have supported PR statehood since 2000.

http://www.puertoricoreport.org/puerto-rico-in-the-republican-party-platform/

That post was a joke. The punchline is that American cities are already torn apart by drug violence. 

Surprised they did not want independence. But that would be a stupid choice regardless. Wonder how Greenland is doing with denmark lol.

That was also the first thing I thought.

They'd have to put 51 stars instead of 50 and change all flags... Probably not going to happen.

You guys have it backwards, we need to merge two states together to keep it at 50.

I suggest Maryland and Delaware.

why not rhode island since it's pointless to have a state that small... (how big is puerto rico...?)

It's pointless to have a state that small in size, but Rhode Island has a decent-sized population. It's pointless to have a state with as small a population as Wyoming, but it's pretty big by area.

My solution: we merge Rhode Island and Wyoming. The resulting state would be one of the ten largest by area and not one of the ten smallest by population.

Lol, first of all you missed his joke.

Now, not links at all with the US? Just think of Puerto Rico as a US colony.

Why is it so strange to expect some votes for independence? Not all of them are Canadian or Australian ;)

61% of 54% is just a 33% voting for statehood. I don't know much of this whole process as I'm not American but if the referendum is not binding then I can see politicians using this as an argument against them joining.

The whole process seems weird. Why break it up into two questions at all? Why not just ask:

Which do you want?

A -- No change
B -- Statehood
C -- More autonomy
D -- Total independence

It seems like in that case, A would have gotten about 46% of the vote, B about 33%, C about 18%, and D the remaining 3%.

But, apparently, that may not be what actually happened. These numbers have it that about 1.7 to 1.8 million total votes were cast in the election; "more than 900,000 voters, or 54%" voted to change the status quo on the first question. (By my calculations that would mean about 1.7 million voted on the first question).

One would assume, because of the way the questions were phrased, that only those roughly 900,000 voters would have responded to the second question -- yet evidently about 1.3 million answered it. So that 61% is actually 61% of 1.3 million, not out of the initial 54%. "Nearly 800,000" voted for statehood directly in the second question. About 510,000 combined for the other two options in that question, while "less than 500,000" abstained from that question entirely.

So, if we use a base of about 1.7-1.8 million voters, about 43-47% of them voted for statehood. About 46% voted for the status quo in the first question, while only 28-29% voted for the status quo 'by default' in the second question by abstaining.

We need more accurate numbers, and Puerto Rico needed a single, crystal-clear question. I wonder whether it's possible whoever wrote the questions wants the status quo to change in some way, and designed the questions to lead to that end. That would be pretty manipulative, but this is politics, so I wouldn't be surprised.