Last week, Denmark held national elections. R. Spencer Oliver, an American statesman living in Denmark, has this commentary on Denmark’s election system. Oliver feels Denmark’s election system is better than the system used in the United States. He notes voter turnout in Denmark’s recent election was 87.7%, and he also notes that Denmark, because of proportional representation, has eight parties in its Parliament.

Oliver was chief counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs between 1985 and 1993. Since 1993 he has been Secretary General of the International Secretariat of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, more commonly known as the Helsinki Accords organization. In the Watergate scandal of 1972, he was one of the persons whose phone was tapped by Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign. At the time, Oliver was a Democratic Party official. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.

According to this story, former Florida State Senator Nancy Argenziano will run for Congress in 2012 as the nominee of the Independent Party. Earlier, Argenziano had expressed a desire to be a Democratic Party nominee in 2012, but the new election law passed this year forbids anyone from running in a party primary if that person had been a member of another qualified party during the preceding year. Argenziano left the Republican Party some time ago and registered as a member of the Independent Party, which is ballot-qualified. It appears her intent was to become an independent candidate. But, she is making the best of the situation, and will stick with the Independent Party.

Another part of the article refers to new requirements on small qualified parties, that they organize themselves with a structure similar to the Democratic and Republican Parties. That is also part of the election law passed in 2011. However, the new law does not unambiguously say what the article says it does. And even if the new law is interpreted strictly, it would then be unconstitutional under a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court opinion that says states cannot tell parties how to be organized. That decision, released in 1989, is called San Francisco County Democratic Central Committee v Eu, 489 U.S. 214. Also, in Jenness v Fortson, the U.S. Supreme Court said that it would be unconstitutional for states to treat small parties as though they were the same as the two major parties.

Two of the most important and interesting election law cases in the nation have been unreasonably delayed by two U.S. Courts of Appeals. The Second Circuit heard arguments in Maslow v Board of Elections in the City of New York, 08-3075, on May 19, 2009, and there is still no decision. That case was argued in front of Judges Peter W. Hall, Debra Ann Livingston, and Chester Stroud. The issue is whether candidate petitions (in primaries) may be circulated by people who aren’t members of that party.

The Sixth Circuit has never scheduled oral arguments in Kurita v The State Primary Board of the Tennessee Democratic Party, 08-6245, even though all the briefs have been filed since May 26, 2009. The issue is whether a political party has the authority to remove the winner of its own primary and substitute the runner-up. The Tennessee Democratic Party refused to certify Rosalind Kurita as its nominee for State Senate in 2008, even though she won the Tennessee Democratic Party primary and even though she was the incumbent. The party said it suspected Republicans had voted in the Democratic primary and that Kurita would not have won without those Republican votes. Tennessee does not have registration by party. Most observers feel the real motivation for the party’s action was that Senator Kurita had voted against her own party when the Senate had chosen officers. The U.S. District Court had upheld the Democratic Party’s decision on October 14, 2008.