> Visions of faceless large corporations or even HAL controlling a small town are frightening and the stuff of science fiction.
Company towns are well-recorded history, not science fiction. Lost Hills California (home of Wonderful Pistachios) exists in the real, present, non-fictional world.
That does not make it not frightening nor not the stuff of science fiction. We know how awful corporate towns are that’s partly why cyberpunk is what it is.
It's specifically about corporations that own property in a specific town voting. So no you can't just spin up a bunch of LLCs to rig an election, this is about the rights of absentee landlords.
> Where a voter is entitled
to vote by virtue of being both a resident and as an owner of real
property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote; where a voter
is entitled to vote by ownership of two or more parcels of real
property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote.
> Any legal entity other than a natural person entitled to vote, must
cast its vote by a duly executed and notarized power of attorney from
the legal entity granting the authority to cast its vote to its
designated attorney-in-fact… The person casting the ballot for such
entity shall be age 18 on or before the date of the election and a
citizen of the United States.
Also what constitutes ownership here? Couldn't some Enterprising Individuals open 100 shell companies, pool together resources and form the Legalize Asbestos Consortium, the Consortium buys a plot of land and then each stakeholder of the Consortium counts as an owner of the plot of land?
FWIW, it sounds like the judge may be open to ruling against such an action. From his decision at https://aboutblaw.com/blQg:
> Even if Plaintiff had made a “vote dilution” or “one person/one vote” claim under the Equal Protection Clause, it fails. Plaintiff does not assert facts that would adequately support such a claim. Plaintiff does not allege... that natural person voters are a minority or are politically cohesive [or] that entity property owners vote sufficiently as a bloc to usually defeat the preferred candidates of natural persons.
Although he also notes that the recent Callais case, severely weakening section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, may change this - and, of course, waiting until the Legalize Asbestos Consortium is doing its thing and trying to file a lawsuit is much more complex than preemptively saying "only natural persons can vote."
It does say that multiple owners of a single property can not have their voting rights apportioned by value, as this would be dilution or would not fit one person/one vote.
> I appreciate that Plaintiff may disagree with Delaware’s policy of authorizing certain municipalities to allow voting on behalf of entity property owners. Visions of faceless large corporations or even HAL, 55 controlling a small town are frightening and the stuff of science fiction. However, Plaintiff has not demonstrated that this policy violates the principle of one person/entity/one vote.
It fundamentally violates one person/entity/one vote. Corporations are not sentient. If you let them vote, a person gets to vote twice. There's no way around that conflict. I feel like this has to collapse on appeal or the nation is doomed.
> Where a voter is entitled
to vote by virtue of being both a resident and as an owner of real
property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote; where a voter
is entitled to vote by ownership of two or more parcels of real
property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote.
However, that seems to get messy with multi-owner LLCs where you might give 1% of each LLC to a bunch of your buddies and have them each vote as POA for theirs.
IANAA. It would seemed to be recorded, not registered, land. Which means I wouldn't think approval would be required in the first place (the lot isn't going to be buildable though, of course]
Owning property through a corporation is trivial. 3 of my nearby neighbors are owned via an LLC (rentals).
* Start an LLC/C-corp for a trivial amount of money.
* Purchase land, but instead of paying with it via a personal check, you need a touch of foresight so you can "capitalize" the corporation you just started. Write the check from the corporation, instead of your personal checkbook.
yeah so it sounds like if you did this IN THIS TOWN and didn't also live in the town you'd get a vote. I'm not sure if you'd get a vote if you owned the land directly but for all I know you might.
I own property in a nearby town but it's an investment; I don't live there. I'm unable to vote in their local elections. I have not heard of property ownership being a qualification to vote since the 1800s.
I own property there, I pay property taxes there (at the highest "non-owner-occupied" rate), in my case I'm actively operating a business not (just) a passive investor. Why should I have zero say in how those taxes are spent, or other local governance? I'm not a disinterested bystander.
I was daydreaming about, picture if a corporation buys an entire state.
Say, Wyoming or West Virginia. Gemini guesses $180 billion to $250 billion.
With that investment, they'd get to control who lives in the state.
So, then the corporation gets to control who the Governor is. And the two Senators, and the seat in the Congress.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but doesn't a single Senator have just a tremendous amount of power to block basically any legislation? With pocket vetoes, or silent filibusters?
Granted, actually buying a Senator is probably cheaper by a few orders of magnitude.
Look up Vernon CA history. It is pretty much this where there are a couple city owned residential properties, rest of city is nearly purely industrial, and tenancy of these tightly controlled to shape local election outcomes.
FWIW, you have a risk of losing your senator every 6 years, and senators don't have power in local matters.
Plus, the way things are going with conservatives pushing hard for federalism, owning local matters could become more important, anyway. You might be onto something...
I don’t understand why people have so much trouble understanding that a “corporation” is just a proxy for the humans that own and control the corporation. In this case, non-residents who own a house on the island can vote according to the charter. The charter just says that this doesn’t change because you move ownership of the house into a legal entity that some human then owns and controls.
The actual grievance seems to be unrelated to the corporation itself. People just associate “corporations” with rich people, and they won’t want rich people to vote.
Is this rich person also voting in the place where they actually live? I'm not against a rich person voting, I just don't want them to get more than one vote. I haven't read the opinion to see if that's addressed.
I don't think anyone would object to a rich person casting a single vote and maybe putting a bumper sticker on their car or a sign in their yard. The issue people take with the rich and politics is the outsized influence they wield in elections. The whole "one person one vote" thing falls apart when the rich can throw millions at advertisements and millions at the "charities" run by the politicians they bought.
Does a corporation need healthcare? Can a corporation be jailed? Does a corporation have a finite life in which they can pursue happiness? Does a corporation have offspring it's trying to raise? Does a corporation have hopes and dreams? Does a corporation wish to visit a park or visit with their neighbors? Are you for real?
Replace "corporation" in each of your questions above with "organizational model employed by people as a mechanism for coordinating complex activities", and the answers should all become clear.
Much of the discourse on this topic involves muddled, contradictory thinking that simultaneously argues "corporations aren't people" and "corporations are exercising autonomous agency as singular entities distinct from the people who constitute them". These two premises cannot both be true.
The problem is voting has historically been limited to, real, living things. This has inherently limited the total amount of votes cast and where.
Corporations are an artificial entity that literally anyone can make. Even things like property ownership are somewhat artificial. Lots can generally be split and joined through a process.
This allowance of artificial entities voting seems to open a rabbit hole of secondary issues.
The problem is corporations mostly don't have the same interests in communities as people and they are motivated by other concerns that can run counter to the good of society. So yea.
If the corporation is just a proxy for the owners then why is this in court? Why aren't the humans just voting directly? It's well established that it's OK for humans to vote.
The question is, why did they bother to take it to court instead of just transferring ownership directly to their persons and then voting as humans? If corporations are just proxies then why bother with the lawyers and the court fees and the time?
Because they want the other benefits of the corporate form. Why should they have to choose between the benefits of the corporate structure and exercising the rights the municipality has given property owners?
because the city of Fenwick Island decided it wanted to set things up a different way, the ACLU challenged, and the judge said the city can it up how they want to.
The question is not what the law says (the headline is sufficient to understand that), but why people are doing this at all. If corporations are just proxies for their owners, then owners who want a vote could just own the property in their own name rather than their corporation's and problem solved. There is some reason they don't do this. I want rayiner to spell it out for me, because that "a corporation is just a proxy" line is 100% horseshit.
> If corporations are just proxies for their owners, then owners who want a vote could just own the property in their own name rather than their corporation's and problem solved
Exactly! They could do that, so the law shouldn’t treat the two situations differently. You just proved my point, not yours.
> There is some reason they don't do this
I’m sure they have many reasons. But that doesn’t change the fact that the corporation is a proxy for people.
Your real argument seems to be that you think people should have to choose between exercising their rights and having the protections of the corporate form.
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan - and the First Amendment it draws upon - applies to everyone, regardless of what corporation they may or may not work for. An unemployed person is protected from defamation claims by public figures under it just fine.
It does not establish any special corporate rights.
Sullivan absolutely establishes corporate rights. Otherwise, Trump could enact a ban on “fake news” and say it applies only to the corporation itself, not the staff. The staff can write whatever they want, but the corporation can’t use its printing presses, etc., to disseminate what the government considers fake news.
> Otherwise, Trump could enact a ban on “fake news” and say it applies only to the corporation itself, not the staff.
That's some really tortured logic.
Such an act would simply be a violation of the First Amendment (and Article I, for that matter). The corporate nature of its target is, again, entirely irrelevant.
Sullivan sets a high standard for defamation claims by public figures. That's it. They protect you saying defamatory things about Hillary Clinton as long as you don't write down "I know this is false and I'm defaming her because I hate her guts" explicitly somewhere.
To save everyone some trouble, "some Delaware elections" refers to elections in a town that amended its charter to explicitly allow legal entities to vote.
More accurately: the town charter allows non-residents to vote if they own property on the island, even if the property is owned through a corporation.
Having corporations be distinct entities whose investors have limited liability is a pretty fundamental to a lot of things. But voting? That is way too far.
If a corporation owns property somewhere but none of its owners actually live there, the corporation itself still obviously has an interest in local governance. It sounds like this locality has decided that property ownership qualfies the owner to a vote. Not all the investors in that corporation get to vote, rather the corporate entity, as a singular thing, gets one vote.
One can imagine all kinds of abusive scenarios with shell corporations created just to get votes, but sounds like the judge thought that these imaginary scenarios were not demonstrated to be actually happening. Courts typically rule only on demonstrated harm or other actual evidence, not "what if" conjectures.
> Karsnitz dismissed the lawsuit from Delaware’s Superior Court, citing “the principle of one person/entity/one vote.”
What? The principle is "one person, one vote". I'd like to cite the principle of "one person, one vote, unless they're named recursivecaveat in which case 1 trillion votes" to assert my rights in the Fenwick island elections please.
In this case, I don’t agree. The municipal charter here allows non-residents who own property on the island to vote. Why should it be different whether I own the property in my own name, or I own a corporation that in turn owns the property?
To the extent there’s a problem here, the problem is the municipal charter essentially allows “property to vote.” That seems to be the real problem.
Then it wouldn't be a big deal to change that charter, right? Right? Right? Of course, if the actual locals are bothered by it - not us on the internet with exactly zero dogs in that fight.
I absolutely agree. They shouldn't be able to vote and they shouldn't have free speech rights. Corporations are a legal structure - a way to allow risk sharing to encourage investment that would otherwise maybe not happen if one had to risk everything in order to invest. But when we choose to allow that, and it is a choice, we should not give those entities the rights of people. It is simply absurd.
You can register a corporation in Delaware for $109.
The Town of Fenwick Island mentioned here has a population of 400.
It's high noon for this matter, & about time to start repealing corporate rights. The undoing of this travesty should be a federal project. But hopefully Delaware can course correct themselves, and reverse the mega-threat to humanity they have been unleashing. At least states like Hawaii are heading in the opposite direction already, saying corporations are not people and denying them human speech rights. Potentially immortal easy to spawn companies should indeed not be granted full human rights. https://inequality.org/article/hawaii-targets-citizens-unite...
The state of Hawaii was the most recent to be expropriated from its natives at the behest of corporate landlords, so they're probably a bit raw about it.
Doing this at scale might be even cheaper than that. A Delaware Series LLC is $300/year, which then lets you make an unlimited number of independent legal entities. You don't even have to file paperwork with the state to create these new entities, just your own internal bookkeeping. Although presumably you'd have to file paperwork to transfer them a tiny sliver of real estate ($$), register to vote (free), and to actually vote (free).
The original complaint cites no minimum land ownership requirement and the judgement does not seem to make specific disagreement with this fact as best I can tell, so that is my understanding as well.
This case is specifically about allowing voting for non-resident property owners when the ownership is held by a corporation rather than a natural person.
This reads like satire from a Slate commentary piece on Citizens United. I suppose we’re just waiting around until the majority of corporations in the US are formed and operated by AI agents. And then…
> Visions of faceless large corporations or even HAL controlling a small town are frightening and the stuff of science fiction
The City of London and Hong Kong have half of the voting power held by corporations and City of London is older than any US state, and colony. And so are some of the guilds
Universal suffrage at all, and exclusive to natural persons, is more science fiction than corporations voting
One of the interesting patterns for suffrage has been that it doesn't matter.
Before Great Reform the vast majority of British people can't vote, after it all the moderately wealthy men can now vote. So did that result in massive political change, reflecting the newly enfranchised people's preferences? Nope. Subsequent tinkering expanded suffrage slightly but again, the results were the same. Then last century they did several things in quick succession (often portrayed as "universal suffrage" but as we'll see that's just what people always call any expansion, the "universe" of one's imagination grows). First they gave all men (including poor men), and older women suffrage. This made no appreciable difference except that, having now entertained the idea that women should vote (it wasn't technically illegal before Great Reform it just didn't happen enough to matter) the women realised hey, maybe women should be politicians and that did cause some modest changes. Then they equalised voting age for men and women, so now a 21 year old can vote regardless of gender.
Later in that century the UK gave almost† all 18 year olds the vote too, and again the worry was maybe a 19 year old will vote differently? Nope. More or less the same results.
So, maybe giving corporations the vote changes nothing, but I'm less hopeful than I was for giving Sarah, an 18 year living with her parents on benefits the vote knowing that for some insane reason she's not actually much more likely to vote against a "Fuck Sarah, take her money away" policy than everybody else is because apparently all people are morons so giving more of them suffrage changed nothing. I think corporations are psychopaths not morons...
† Although most crooks in the UK aren't magically stopped from voting, they can't vote in prison and in practice it's very hard to vote from prison even if it would be legal for you because you're held there prior to a trial or whatever. So that's not ideal. It is controversial whether specific electoral interference crimes should result in withdrawal of suffrage, as is the practice today or whether that's just petty and ultimately futile.
[[ I still support universal suffrage, but because now it's everybody's fault. You're not going to get a good government, but now the terrible government is your fault too. ]]
This seems disingenuous. The City of London and Hong Kong being "corporations". They're still nations. It's like Pennsylvania arguing that it's a Commonwealth and not a state. When people do not have equal representation under the law the people are not free. We call it authoritarianism.
Republicans have just lost the right to whinge about illegal immigrants being able to vote. Even if it were true... let them vote. Their say in what happens to them in this country matters more than that of any corporation.
Someone does something you don’t like in a state that overwhelmingly voted for Harris, where Democrats control every level of government and appoint all the judges. But somehow it’s still Trump’s fault lol.
You asserted "Everyone in this story is a Democrat".
That seems unlikely, given the town is a red precinct.
No one said anything about Trump's fault, just that there are clearly people and entire regions in Delaware who vote Republican. Look how red that map is - plenty of Republicans in local government.
It's a low effort partisan comment, but "Republicans" generally represent the naked corporate agenda (bad cop) while the "Democrats" at least try to hide it and throw the People some concessions (good cop).
Don't play coy. We are obviously talking about the overall national political landscape, extrapolating from this one development to its part in a larger trend. The specific politics of Delaware (which team is the incumbent and how the state is openly corporate friendly) don't change that.
Company towns are well-recorded history, not science fiction. Lost Hills California (home of Wonderful Pistachios) exists in the real, present, non-fictional world.
Sure you can. You just have to sell them some land as part of it.
> Where a voter is entitled to vote by virtue of being both a resident and as an owner of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote; where a voter is entitled to vote by ownership of two or more parcels of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote.
> Any legal entity other than a natural person entitled to vote, must cast its vote by a duly executed and notarized power of attorney from the legal entity granting the authority to cast its vote to its designated attorney-in-fact… The person casting the ballot for such entity shall be age 18 on or before the date of the election and a citizen of the United States.
That just means I have to give 100 people POAs.
> Even if Plaintiff had made a “vote dilution” or “one person/one vote” claim under the Equal Protection Clause, it fails. Plaintiff does not assert facts that would adequately support such a claim. Plaintiff does not allege... that natural person voters are a minority or are politically cohesive [or] that entity property owners vote sufficiently as a bloc to usually defeat the preferred candidates of natural persons.
Although he also notes that the recent Callais case, severely weakening section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, may change this - and, of course, waiting until the Legalize Asbestos Consortium is doing its thing and trying to file a lawsuit is much more complex than preemptively saying "only natural persons can vote."
It does say that multiple owners of a single property can not have their voting rights apportioned by value, as this would be dilution or would not fit one person/one vote.
> I appreciate that Plaintiff may disagree with Delaware’s policy of authorizing certain municipalities to allow voting on behalf of entity property owners. Visions of faceless large corporations or even HAL, 55 controlling a small town are frightening and the stuff of science fiction. However, Plaintiff has not demonstrated that this policy violates the principle of one person/entity/one vote.
how do they do that?
> Where a voter is entitled to vote by virtue of being both a resident and as an owner of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote; where a voter is entitled to vote by ownership of two or more parcels of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote.
However, that seems to get messy with multi-owner LLCs where you might give 1% of each LLC to a bunch of your buddies and have them each vote as POA for theirs.
* Start an LLC/C-corp for a trivial amount of money.
* Purchase land, but instead of paying with it via a personal check, you need a touch of foresight so you can "capitalize" the corporation you just started. Write the check from the corporation, instead of your personal checkbook.
Say, Wyoming or West Virginia. Gemini guesses $180 billion to $250 billion.
With that investment, they'd get to control who lives in the state.
So, then the corporation gets to control who the Governor is. And the two Senators, and the seat in the Congress.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but doesn't a single Senator have just a tremendous amount of power to block basically any legislation? With pocket vetoes, or silent filibusters?
Granted, actually buying a Senator is probably cheaper by a few orders of magnitude.
The Constitution also overrides any attempt to prevent interstate migration.
Sure, but if there is no where you can legally stay, because the sole landowner prohibits it, how do you migrate?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Florida_Tourism_Oversi...
Plus, the way things are going with conservatives pushing hard for federalism, owning local matters could become more important, anyway. You might be onto something...
The actual grievance seems to be unrelated to the corporation itself. People just associate “corporations” with rich people, and they won’t want rich people to vote.
I don't think anyone would object to a rich person casting a single vote and maybe putting a bumper sticker on their car or a sign in their yard. The issue people take with the rich and politics is the outsized influence they wield in elections. The whole "one person one vote" thing falls apart when the rich can throw millions at advertisements and millions at the "charities" run by the politicians they bought.
I think it might be more than that
Much of the discourse on this topic involves muddled, contradictory thinking that simultaneously argues "corporations aren't people" and "corporations are exercising autonomous agency as singular entities distinct from the people who constitute them". These two premises cannot both be true.
Corporations are an artificial entity that literally anyone can make. Even things like property ownership are somewhat artificial. Lots can generally be split and joined through a process.
This allowance of artificial entities voting seems to open a rabbit hole of secondary issues.
Why shouldn't they?
They're trading one benefit for another.
The individual house owners don't get all the benefits of an LLC for similar reasons.
Exactly! They could do that, so the law shouldn’t treat the two situations differently. You just proved my point, not yours.
> There is some reason they don't do this
I’m sure they have many reasons. But that doesn’t change the fact that the corporation is a proxy for people.
Your real argument seems to be that you think people should have to choose between exercising their rights and having the protections of the corporate form.
It simply sets a high standard for proving defamation claims by public figures.
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan - and the First Amendment it draws upon - applies to everyone, regardless of what corporation they may or may not work for. An unemployed person is protected from defamation claims by public figures under it just fine.
It does not establish any special corporate rights.
That's some really tortured logic.
Such an act would simply be a violation of the First Amendment (and Article I, for that matter). The corporate nature of its target is, again, entirely irrelevant.
Sullivan sets a high standard for defamation claims by public figures. That's it. They protect you saying defamatory things about Hillary Clinton as long as you don't write down "I know this is false and I'm defaming her because I hate her guts" explicitly somewhere.
... and you can probably come up with a legal way to permanently bind a corporation to vote according to specific rules.
... and larger corporations have totally inhuman internal decision making processes that frequently arrive at conclusions no human would reach.
One can imagine all kinds of abusive scenarios with shell corporations created just to get votes, but sounds like the judge thought that these imaginary scenarios were not demonstrated to be actually happening. Courts typically rule only on demonstrated harm or other actual evidence, not "what if" conjectures.
What? The principle is "one person, one vote". I'd like to cite the principle of "one person, one vote, unless they're named recursivecaveat in which case 1 trillion votes" to assert my rights in the Fenwick island elections please.
To the extent there’s a problem here, the problem is the municipal charter essentially allows “property to vote.” That seems to be the real problem.
The Town of Fenwick Island mentioned here has a population of 400.
It's high noon for this matter, & about time to start repealing corporate rights. The undoing of this travesty should be a federal project. But hopefully Delaware can course correct themselves, and reverse the mega-threat to humanity they have been unleashing. At least states like Hawaii are heading in the opposite direction already, saying corporations are not people and denying them human speech rights. Potentially immortal easy to spawn companies should indeed not be granted full human rights. https://inequality.org/article/hawaii-targets-citizens-unite...
Or several companies with the same interest in mind voted for something good for the companies, bad for individuals.
The City of London and Hong Kong have half of the voting power held by corporations and City of London is older than any US state, and colony. And so are some of the guilds
Universal suffrage at all, and exclusive to natural persons, is more science fiction than corporations voting
Before Great Reform the vast majority of British people can't vote, after it all the moderately wealthy men can now vote. So did that result in massive political change, reflecting the newly enfranchised people's preferences? Nope. Subsequent tinkering expanded suffrage slightly but again, the results were the same. Then last century they did several things in quick succession (often portrayed as "universal suffrage" but as we'll see that's just what people always call any expansion, the "universe" of one's imagination grows). First they gave all men (including poor men), and older women suffrage. This made no appreciable difference except that, having now entertained the idea that women should vote (it wasn't technically illegal before Great Reform it just didn't happen enough to matter) the women realised hey, maybe women should be politicians and that did cause some modest changes. Then they equalised voting age for men and women, so now a 21 year old can vote regardless of gender.
Later in that century the UK gave almost† all 18 year olds the vote too, and again the worry was maybe a 19 year old will vote differently? Nope. More or less the same results.
So, maybe giving corporations the vote changes nothing, but I'm less hopeful than I was for giving Sarah, an 18 year living with her parents on benefits the vote knowing that for some insane reason she's not actually much more likely to vote against a "Fuck Sarah, take her money away" policy than everybody else is because apparently all people are morons so giving more of them suffrage changed nothing. I think corporations are psychopaths not morons...
† Although most crooks in the UK aren't magically stopped from voting, they can't vote in prison and in practice it's very hard to vote from prison even if it would be legal for you because you're held there prior to a trial or whatever. So that's not ideal. It is controversial whether specific electoral interference crimes should result in withdrawal of suffrage, as is the practice today or whether that's just petty and ultimately futile.
[[ I still support universal suffrage, but because now it's everybody's fault. You're not going to get a good government, but now the terrible government is your fault too. ]]
Per https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2024_United_States_P..., Fenwick Island itself went red (the absolute bottom-right-most spot).
That seems unlikely, given the town is a red precinct.
No one said anything about Trump's fault, just that there are clearly people and entire regions in Delaware who vote Republican. Look how red that map is - plenty of Republicans in local government.