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.

I mean... Larry Ellison bought an entire Hawaiian island... from the Dole family

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C4%81na%CA%BBi

Dupont, WA is another

Water main upgrade canceled because Sandeep from Nepal voted against it.

> So no you can't just spin up a bunch of LLCs to rig an election…

Sure you can. You just have to sell them some land as part of it.

How about fuck absentee landlords, especially if they're not actually people?

And when my plot of land is co-owned by my 100 shell corporations?

Read the opinion.

> 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 sounds like you it's only corporations that own property in the town that get to vote. So that's probably whats preventing you.

A quick Google search suggests Fenwick Island has ~400 residents. The only thing stopping you would be someone else with more resources.

Should start a bunch of unions to rig the vote.

Senators can't veto, and filibusters require 40 other Senators to play ball.

The Constitution also overrides any attempt to prevent interstate migration.

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...

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.

I have no problem with individual jurisdictions controlling how their domestic-chartered companies operate/speak/vote — particularly with the recent Hawai'ian example: [in attempts of] reversing Citizens United, by removing political speech from corporate entities. Bravo, Hawaii.

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.

> 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.

Setting aside the corporation part, is there precedent for allowing people to vote in multiple residences? In my experience, when you register to vote in one location you are no longer allowed to vote where you were previously registered, regardless of how many places you own houses. Some places cross-reference voter registrations to enforce this, and others don't really check, but it has been the rule everywhere I have lived.

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?

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.

> ... they won’t want rich people to vote.

I think it might be more than that

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.

"Corporations are controlled by humans, therefore critics are motivated by anti-rich sentiment" is definitely a take

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.

This is an impressively awful take, congratulations.

Corporations aren't people and don't have rights or votes.

If you want to have a say in the way a place is run, you can do so in your capacity as a person.

If you want to do so from a legal fiction "proxy", fuck off.

When I hear people grouse about the concept corporate rights, I always ask them why they hate New York Times _Co._ v. Sullivan.

... and if they own 50 houses, each through a separate LLC, they can vote 50 times, even if they do not in fact even live in the area.

... 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.

Submissions with too many comments for their votes receive a penalty. This is to stop flame wars.

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.

Same question. So someone rich can spin up shell companies to steer elections hmm...

Or several companies with the same interest in mind voted for something good for the companies, bad for individuals.

Do you care enough about the local governance of the Town of Fenwick Island to do this?

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.

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.

Absolutely not. If you don’t live there, then your vote shouldn’t matter as much as someone who does live there.

that's a different legal question than the one here.

Why?

Nice assertion. No. You should be able to vote where you live. Full stop. Nothing else. You don't get more than one vote.

The point of an limited liability company is to limit that aspect substantially.

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 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.

https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/about-us/voting-elections/bu...

Gives more details on the ability of companies to vote in City of London elections.

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.

What do “Republicans” have to do with this? This is Delaware. Everyone in this story is a Democrat.