The Libertarian Party of Alaska has increased its registration by approximately 1,000 voters in the last three months. The party will be removed from the ballot unless it gets its registration up to 9,786 in the next year. It now has 7,000 registrants, which makes it already the strongest Libertarian Party state affiliate in the nation, when each state is compared on what share of the state’s voters are registered Libertarians.

In 2004, the legislature made ballot access more difficult for parties that qualify by registration, but only for mid-term years. The 2004 law is somewhat irrational, and requires a party to have registration of 3% of the last vote cast. Since turnout in presidential years is about 30% higher than in midterm years, this means the requirements shoot up after a presidential election, and then go down again. If the 2004 amendment had not passed, parties in Alaska would need 7,120 registrants for 2010 instead of 9,786.

The bill in the U.S. House for a popular vote on Puerto Rico’s future status, HR 2499, now has 147 co-sponsors. Nine more co-sponsors were gained in the last 3 days of last week.

The probable confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court will probably highlight the political status of Puerto Rico in the coming months. Although Sotomayor was born in New York city, her parents were born in Puerto Rico, and the family traveled to Puerto Rico every summer while she was growing up. Her undergraduate senior thesis at Princeton was about Puerto Rico’s ambiguous political status, and her law review note at Yale was about the effect of possible Puerto Rican statehood on the island’s mineral and ocean rights.

The recent U.N. hearings on the status of Puerto Rico are also drawing attention to the issue. If Puerto Rico were to become a state, it would have 10 electoral votes.

On June 20, Texas Governor Rick Perry signed HB 1193, which relaxes the deadline for qualified parties to certify the names of their presidential and vice-presidential nominees. This bill probably would never have been passed if Bob Barr had not sued the Secretary of State last year for listing John McCain and Barack Obama, even though their names were not certified by the deadline. The new deadline is simply related to the date the qualified parties hold their national conventions. In theory a qualified party in Texas in the future could hold a presidential convention in October and the state would still be forced to list their nominees on the ballot.