Word: commonwealths
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...Popular Democratic Party's Hernández Colón, who was Governor for four years before losing to Romero in 1976, campaigned aggressively against statehood, insisting that Puerto Ricans did not want to relinquish their 28-year-old commonwealth status. To guard against election fraud, he issued a "call to the trenches" for his followers. They became so stirred as initial results came in on election night that a large crowd marched on the Roberto Clemente Coliseum, where the ballots were counted. They threw rocks at police and at cars displaying the N.P.P.'s palm tree emblems...
...Uganda broadcast the news that Obote's Uganda People's Congress had won a majority in the new 126-seat parliament, the air was filled with the crackle of machine guns and the dull thud of exploding grenades. At the Speke Hotel, headquarters of the 60-member Commonwealth observer team that had monitored the voting, diplomats dove under the dining room tables. Asked why roaming, drunken soldiers were shooting up the city, a young private replied: "Because we are rejoicing." It was chilling to contemplate what the trigger-happy troops would have done if they had been angered...
...Muwanga gave Obote's well-endowed party every advantage over its impoverished rival, the Catholic-dominated Democratic Party. Droves of government Land-Rovers distributed Obote's red, black and blue campaign posters. Government-controlled newspapers gave Obote a virtual monopoly on coverage. Concluded a spokesman for the Commonwealth observer team: "The whole thing stinks...
What one member of the British Commonwealth observer group called "the sheer sweep of maladministration" forced interminable queues of voters to wait for more than twelve hours at many polling booths. As a result, there was a second, unscheduled day of balloting. Even as the votes were counted, the ruling military commission headed by Paulo Muwanga first imposed, and then reversed, a highhanded decision to withhold the election results and even nullify them. Finally, after conflicting victory claims by the rival parties, the first official results showed that the apparent winner was the broadly based United People's Congress...
...panelists disagreed in their advice to the city for coping with the measure, which will cut Commonwealth property taxes to 2 1/2 per cent of the assessed market value and reduce auto excise taxes...