House Speaker Edmund S. Villagomez declared yesterday a vacancy in the House of Representatives and requested Gov. Ralph DLG Torres to call for a special election to fill the slot.<\/p>\n
The vacancy was created with the recent passing of the late representative Ivan James Alafanso Blanco, who represented a Precinct 3 seat on Saipan. Blanco, 45, passed away last July 23 due to massive pulmonary embolism.
\nVillagomez noted in a letter to Torres that Blanco has not served one-half or more of his term in the 22nd House of Representatives. He cited Article 2, Section 9 of the CNMI Constitution, which provides that \u201cA vacancy in the legislature shall be filled by special election if one-half or more of the term remains.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf less than one-half of the term remains, the governor shall fill the vacancy by appointing the largest number of votes and is willing to serve or, if no candidate is available, a person qualified for the office from the district represented,\u201d the Constitution adds.<\/p>\n
Precinct 3 is the same precinct that also had a special election in March 2019, following the death of representative Francisco Dela Cruz in January 2019. Marko Taisakan Peter of the Republican Party easily won that special election in a four-way race.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
House Speaker Edmund S. Villagomez declared yesterday a vacancy in the House of Representatives and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":349592,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"class_list":["post-349591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","tag-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349591\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}