The next House of Commons election in Great Britain will be held in the next three months. The date hasn’t been announced yet. The House has 646 seats. The Green Party says it will have candidates in over 300 districts, its highest number yet. So far, the Green Party has never elected anyone to the House of Commons. See this story.

The current partisan lineup is: Labour 346, Conservative 193, Liberal Democrat 63, independents 10, Democratic Unionist 8, Scottish National 7, Sinn Fein 5, Plaid Cymru 3, Social Democrat & Labour 3, Respect 1, Ulster Unionist 1. There are also 2 vacant seats, and 4 seats held by the speaker and the speaker’s deputies that are considered non-partisan. The 5 Sinn Fein members do not attend.

Ballot access is a fee of 500 pounds, plus 10 signatures. If the candidate gets at least 5% of the vote, the fee is returned to the candidate after the election.

The Election Law Journal is an eight-year old quarterly journal. All the articles are peer-reviewed, and the journal is the only scholarly publication that covers the entire spectrum of issues related to election law. It is found in university law libraries and university social science libraries. Anyone may subscribe, but it costs $771 per year.

The most recent issue contains a book review of Theresa Amato’s “Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny”, a 432-page book published last year. The review is by Professor Mark Rush, Professor of Politics and Law and head of the Department of Politics at Washington and Lee University. The review is very favorable to the book. Rush says, “Amato’s call for systemwide electoral reform is unassailable. The structures and the practices that characterize American elections are indefensible…It is clear that the American presidential election system would not survive the scrutiny of the electoral observers we send to other countries…Amato’s argument is powerful and eloquent.” The review concludes by saying that the book is a “piercing, thoughtful, well-written analysis of the contemporary American electoral process.”

Rush also adds, “Her account of Nader’s being shut out of presidential debates in Illinois, banned from the buildings in which they were taking place, and being threatened with arrest if he tried to attend the debate is truly amazing and frightening.”

The Libertarian Party of North Dakota is racing to finish its petition for party recognition by the April 9 deadline. The requirement is 7,000 signatures, and the party has more than 4,000.

The petition to recognize a political party has existed in North Dakota since 1939 (prior to that, there were only independent candidate petitions, which permitted the candidate using the independent procedure to choose a party label that was printed on the November ballot next to the candidate’s name). In all the years the North Dakota party petition procedure has existed, no party has ever used it in a midterm year.

Between 1939 and 1980, the party petition was 15,000 signatures, but the 8th circuit ruled in McLain v Meier that the law was too harsh. In 1981 the legislature lowered it to 7,000 signatures.

The most important offices up in North Dakota in 2010 are U.S. Senate, U.S. House, and Secretary of State. If the Libertarian Party gets on the ballot in 2010 and polls as much as 5% for Secretary of State, it will be automatically on the ballot in 2012.