On May 14, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Igartua v United States, 11-876. This is the case on whether the U.S. is obliged by various treaties it has signed to give Puerto Rico voting representation in Congress. Although the First Circuit had ruled against Puerto Rico in this same case, the decision had been 2-1.

Puerto Rico is the most populous jurisdiction in the world which has no voting representative in the national legislature (among those countries that have elected national legislative bodies). If Puerto Rico were entitled to voting representatives in the U.S. House, it would have eight or nine U.S. House members.

All overseas possessions of France, Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal are treated as parts of that nation, for representation in the national legislature. This is not true for Great Britain, but Great Britain’s most populous unrepresented colonial possession is Bermuda, which has fewer than 75,000 inhabitants. Aside from that, the Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man, are not considered parts of Great Britain and have their own parliaments, even though they recognize the British monarch as their own head of state.

On May 13, the most populous German state, North Rhine-Westphalia, held elections for its own state government. The Green Party polled 11.3%, the Free Democrats polled 8.6%, the Pirate Party polled 7.8%, and The Left polled 2.5%. The Social Democrats polled 39.1% and the Christian Democratic Union, which governs Germany, only polled 26.3%. Other parties polled the remainder of the vote. See this story.

Michael Russnow is a California scriptwriter and recently an officer with the Writers Guild of America. He has worked on many well-known television series, and some films, and is a Democrat and a former congressional aide. He has this commentary on California’s top-two “open primary” system here.

He mentions the California June 2012 primary ballot, which lists 24 candidates for U.S. Senate. Having that many candidates in the primary season is not unusual in California. In 2010, there were 23 candidates on the various primary ballots for Governor. But, in 2010, no California ballot was crowded, because those 23 gubernatorial candidates were distributed on the separate primary ballots of six different political parties. The top-two system creates one large primary ballot for all seven of California’s qualified parties, so the system gives the appearance of lots of candidates.

California has fewer legislative candidates in 2012 than it did in 2010.