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EUROPEAN UNION

How you can vote in advance of Denmark’s EU elections

With several weeks still to go until the June 9th EU elections in Denmark, votes can be submitted from Monday after local authorities began accepting postal votes.

Published: 29 April 2024 12:22 CEST
How you can vote in advance of Denmark’s EU elections
Voting papers from the 2019 EU election in Denmark. Photo: Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix

Although the process of early voting is called “postal voting” (brevstemme in Danish), the voting ballot does not necessarily have to be sent by mail.

Advance voting can also take place at official locations including municipal Borgerservice (Citizens’ Service) offices, libraries or educational institutions.

For example, residents in second city Aarhus can vote at the city’s flagship Dokk1 library from Monday. In Copenhagen, a range of locations across the city, listed on the Copenhagen Municipality website, accept postal votes.

To vote by mail, you must attend one of the designated advance voting locations and must bring your ballot card (valgkort) and an accepted form of ID. Valid ID includes a passport, driving license, the yellow health insurance card (sygesikringskort) or the app version of the health card.

In EU parliamentary elections, nationals of all EU countries who reside in Denmark can both vote in the elections and run for office.

Nationals of non-EU countries cannot vote or run in these elections.

To be eligible to vote and run in the EU elections, you must either be eligible to vote in Danish general elections or be an EU national who resides in Denmark. You must be 18 years old or more.

Unlike with general elections, foreign-based Danes can also vote in EU elections in Denmark if they live in another EU country (but not a non-EU country).

READ ALSO: Can EU nationals in Denmark vote in the European elections?

“We are going to scale up after a while will also allow voting at selected libraries,” Aarhus Municipality’s head of election services Lene Hartig Danielsen told newswire Ritzau.

Advance voting is becoming an increasingly popular option relative to attending an polling station on election day.

The 2022 general election saw an advanced voting rate of just under 10 percent, the highest ever.

Advanced votes can also be changed if the voter has a change of heart between submitting the vote and election day. The most recent submitted vote is the one which is counted.

However, it is not possible to vote in person on election day if you have already advance voted.

It should also be noted that you can vote in any municipality, not just the municipality where you live.

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ASYLUM

Denmark joins countries calling for asylum centres outside EU

Denmark is one of 15 EU member states who have sent a joint letter to the European Commission demanding a further tightening of the bloc's asylum policy, which will make it easier to transfer undocumented migrants to third countries, such as Rwanda, including when they are rescued at sea.

Published: 16 May 2024 16:08 CEST
Denmark joins countries calling for asylum centres outside EU

The letter, sent to the European Commission on Thursday, comes less than a month before European Parliament elections, in which far-right anti-immigration parties are forecast to make gains.

The letter asks the European Union’s executive arm to “propose new ways and solutions to prevent irregular migration to Europe”.

The group includes Italy and Greece, which receive a substantial number of the people making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean Sea to reach the EU — many seeking to escape poverty, war or persecution, according to the International Organization for Migration.

They want the EU to toughen up its recently adopted asylum pact, which introduces tighter controls on those seeking to enter the 27-nation bloc.
That reform includes speedier vetting of people arriving without documents, new border detention centres and faster deportation for rejected asylum applicants.

The 15 proposed in their letter the introduction of “mechanisms… aimed at detecting, intercepting — or in cases of distress, rescuing — migrants on the high seas and bringing them to a predetermined place of safety in a partner country outside the EU, where durable solutions for those migrants could be found”.

They said it should be easier to send asylum seekers to third countries while their requests for protection are assessed.

They cited the example of a controversial deal that Italy has struck with non-EU Albania, under which Rome can send thousands of asylum seekers plucked from Italian waters to holding camps in the Balkan country until their cases are processed.

The concept in EU asylum law of what constitutes “safe third countries” should be reassessed, they continued.

Safe country debate

EU law stipulates that people arriving in the bloc without documents can be sent to a third country, where they could have requested asylum — so long as that country is deemed safe and the applicant has a genuine link with it.

That would exclude schemes like the divisive law passed by the UK, which has now left the EU, enabling London to refuse all irregular arrivals the right to request asylum and send them to Rwanda.

Rights groups accuse the African country — ruled with an iron fist by President Paul Kagame since the end of the 1994 genocide that killed around 800,000 people — of cracking down on free speech and political opposition.

The 15 nations said they wanted the EU to make deals with third countries along the main migration routes, citing the example of the arrangement it made with Turkey in 2016 to take in Syrian refugees from the war in their home country.

The letter was signed by Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland and Romania.

It was not signed by Hungary, whose Prime Minister Viktor Orban has resisted EU plans to share out responsibility across the bloc for hosting asylum seekers, or to contribute to the costs of that plan.

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