I am originally from the city of Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, where I was
born on November 28, 1966. I lived and grew up there until 1971, when my
parents, both university professors, went on sabbatical leave to Madrid,
Spain. We lived in Madrid for about one year, and then returned to
Mayagüez. After graduating from the University of Puerto Rico -
Mayagüez Campus in 1988, I moved
to Pittsburgh, PA, where I resided until October 1999, when I returned to
Puerto Rico.
My two main interests are, on the one hand, computers in general and specifically
the Internet, and on the other one comparative politics and history in general
- with emphasis on election processes, and on electoral laws and their political
impact in particular.
The advent of the World Wide Web in 1993-94 made it possible for the first
time to obtain and disseminate detailed news and information from
other countries in the world with relative ease. Eventually, I decided to
make my own contribution to the growing amount of information available on
this new medium of communication.
With that objective in mind, during the summer of 1995 I conceived a Web
home page I originally called Election Data Resources on the Internet - now
Election Resources on the Internet
- with links to Internet sites with detailed election results. I wanted this
page to have a link to Puerto Rican election data as well, but since this
information was not available on the Internet at the time, I then developed
Elections in Puerto Rico from
materials I had available pertaining to recent election processes in Puerto
Rico.
I continued to expand Elections in Puerto Rico since its publication on the
Internet on July 1995, with the inclusion of an archive of past election
results, as well as the complete results of the 1996 general election, an
election maps section, an election statistics lookup facility, the results
of the 1998 plebiscite vote - an event in which I participated as an observer
at the invitation of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico Elections Commission
- and the results of the 2000 general election. I also published on behalf
of the Commission a 1999 primary election results Web site.
From February 2000 to March 2003 I maintained the Commission's official Web
site.
I also expanded Election Resources on the Internet to include the complete
results of South Africa's first
two one-person, one-vote 1994 and 1999 general elections, and
since 2002 sections dedicated to the electoral systems of
Germany,
Spain,
Italy,
South Africa,
New Zealand,
Canada,
Australia,
Denmark,
Portugal, the
United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland,
Norway,
Mexico,
Sweden,
Austria, the
Netherlands,
Brazil,
France,
Finland,
Iceland,
Ireland,
Turkey,
Belgium,
Japan,
Greece,
Switzerland,
Poland,
Luxembourg,
Malta,
Argentina,
Hungary,
Chile, the
United States of America,
Israel,
Latvia, the
Czech Republic,
Slovakia,
Bulgaria,
Costa Rica,
Romania,
Ukraine,
Estonia and
El Salvador.
Since January 2004 Election Resources on the Internet is also published in
Spanish, as
Recursos Electorales
en la Internet.