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• The certified results will be sent to the White House and the congressional leadership, and it would be up to them to begin the process of possibly admitting Puerto Rico into the union.
• "The ball is now in Congress' court and Congress will have to react to this result," Pierluisi said. "This is a clear result that says 'no' to the current status."
• Gov. Luis Fortuno, a member of the pro-statehood party who is also a Republican, welcomed the results and said he was hopeful that Congress would take up the cause.
• But Fortuno won't be around to lead the fight: Voters turned him out of office after one term, and gave the governship to Alejandro Garcia Padilla of the Popular Democratic Party, which wants Puerto Rico to remain a semi-autonomous U.S. commonwealth.
• Garcia has pledged to hold a constitutional assembly in 2014 to address the island's status, followed by another referendum with support from Congress.
• Margarita Nolasco, the vice president of the Puerto Rican Senate from the pro-statehood party, said she feared the commonwealth forces would seek to undermine the plebiscite.
• "At the beginning of the last century, statehood appeared to be an impossible dream," Nolasco said. "After a century of battles and electoral defeats, statehood just became the political force of majority that Puerto Ricans prefer."
• Besides pointing to the defeat of the governor, albeit by a margin of less than 1 percent, skeptics point to other signs that statehood is not ascendant in Puerto Rico.
• Luis Delgado Rodriguez, who leads a group that supports sovereign free association, noted all the voters who left the second question blank, raising questions about their preference. He said those voters, coupled with those who support independence and sovereign free association, add up to more than those who favored statehood.
• "This represents an overwhelming majority against statehood," he said.
• The results are also murky because everyone could vote in the second round no matter how they marked the first question -- and the choice of "sovereign free association" is not the same as the current status. So people could have voted for both no change in the first round and any of the choices in the second. Nearly 65,000 left the first question blank.
• "With that kind of message, Congress is not going to do anything, and neither is President Obama," Rivera said.
• Puerto Rico has been a territory for 114 years and its people have been U.S. citizens since 1917. Residents of the island cannot vote in the U.S. presidential elec

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