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rc-research 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
roxolotl 12 hours ago [-]
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.
There’s really nothing inherently profane about the concept, it’s just often abused. I’d love to see a few working examples out in the real world, personally.
xboxnolifes 7 hours ago [-]
> There’s really nothing inherently profane about the concept, it’s just often abused.
The same thing can be said about any autocratic government, but the practical and documented historical issues are why they are not liked. Just as dictatorship works well when you have a good ruler who cares about the people, the issue isn't if you get a bad ruler, but when.
duped 9 hours ago [-]
Pullman, IL was the model of a company town and started off as a reasonable (if paternalistic) approach to providing good housing and services to your employees.
Unsurprisingly, it did not last.
FuriouslyAdrift 9 hours ago [-]
I mean... Larry Ellison bought an entire Hawaiian island... from the Dole family
Water main upgrade canceled because Sandeep from Nepal voted against it.
cwmma 13 hours ago [-]
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.
ceejayoz 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
SoftTalker 9 hours ago [-]
Land is bought and sold in government-regulated parcels. You can't just split up an acre of land into square foot plots and sell them.
floatrock 8 hours ago [-]
Lets be armchair evil for a sec...
What is the smallest subplot you can split a parcel into?
And are we talking literally land, or would condo ownership suffice? (After all, you typically stack a few condos on top of one parcel of land). The smallest condo is probably dictated by some pesky human habitability rules, but what class of property has the fewest minimum-square-footage zoning rules? Retail probably has egress rules, but what about industrial spaces?
Could you create an industrial park to house a bunch of, to use a rough metaphor, independently-owned/independently-operated phone booths (or whatever other "qualifying use")?
Basically is there a category of land-use you could split ownership off at ridiculous scale, offer LLC-as-a-service to buy a bunch of them, and just for fun, tokenize the votes to provably aggregate the absentee ballots at scale via blockchain?
If it's one-entity-one-vote, what is the most cost-effective way to maximize the number of qualifying entities?
Bonus points for every order of magnitude of synthetic votes you can reasonably achieve over the fleshy variety.
SoftTalker 8 hours ago [-]
In most areas, especially any that are at all developed, land parcels and minimum lot sizes are under the control of a county or city commission, council, board, etc. Subdividing a property is as expensive and time consuming as you might imagine dealing with the government, you'll probably need a lawyer to do it properly, have to appear before at at least one if not several public meetings or hearings, etc. And they will almost certainly deny any petition along the lines of the examples you offered.
Where I am, things like dividing a 5 acre rural property so that a mother-in-law can live in a cottage near her family are routinely denied.
Hizonner 5 hours ago [-]
You mean under the control of the commissions, councils, boards, etc that are being elected in these very elections? Elections in which many actual humans may not be paying attention to positions on "arcane" land use rules, but the non-human legal entities in question (or their managers) will be?
cucumber3732842 3 hours ago [-]
>under the control of the commissions, councils, boards, etc
Let me save you some words.
Next time just call them "the local real estate developer slime balls" because that's who makes up the vase majority of these organizations. Like maybe a particularly upstanding town might have a local banker or lawyer on one of the boards or something.
These are not democratic institutions. They are business groups that happen to be part of government.
These organizations are already in the pocket of business interests. If anything this change is destabilizing because it now means that the PE owned car-wash and the company that owns a bunch of chain franchise businesses in the town as well as every local business that owns land or the landlords thereof but is owned by people who live in the surrounding towns can push back and say "screw you, we're not all willing to bend over and take it so you can make another buck developing another street of McMansions".
Letting megacorps vote is probably bad. But I think we should see where this goes. There's a lot of "enemy of my enemy" potential here for the currently disenfrachinsed business interests to push back on the business interests that are in bed with government to the benifit of the people. Enemy of my enemy is my ally and all that.
singleshot_ 6 hours ago [-]
> What is the smallest subplot you can split a parcel into?
An acre, here. See your local zoning code or land statutes for minimum lot sizes. Consult agreements that run with the land for additional restrictions.
xd1936 9 hours ago [-]
Sure, corporations would _never_ get into the real estate market...
9 hours ago [-]
cogman10 8 hours ago [-]
Why not? Isn't it fundamentally the same idea as apartment complex tenets getting votes? Why couldn't a business sell off lockers to companies giving them voting access? Walk in Closets? Very small room apartments? What's the minimum size of real-estate needed?
throwway120385 5 hours ago [-]
Except if I really wanted to be an awful human being, I'd just buy property, subdivide it, and then multiply my votes in the town election by the number of property units I've individually sold to my various LLCs.
This is kind of a violation of the "one man one vote" ideal that is the bedrock of our society. It easily turns in to "money buys influence" which is exactly the opposite of what made the US a great country to live in. If you don't understand that and you're a US Citizen you should really retake the civics / political science classes from high school.
cogman10 5 hours ago [-]
Totally agree. The argument I'm making is that this Delaware ruling is terrible for exactly the reasons you are outlining.
The judge effectively said in the conclusion "Trust me, there's no abuse and this is fine".
mindslight 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, you can. The county does not appear to be registered land (Torrens title) where the Registry would have some say in whether a transfer is valid. So you can straightforwardly hire a surveyor to draw up a plot plan with many square foot chunks, and then execute and record a different deed for each of them.
singleshot_ 6 hours ago [-]
What would happen if the deed (a contract) was an agreement to violate the law restricting minimum lot sizes and was therefor illegal?
It would be void and regardless of recordation, no transfer or subdivision would have occurred.
mindslight 6 hours ago [-]
My point was that the laws regarding those minimum lot sizes are about buildable lots. Although now that I'm looking into this I think the snag would be trying to record that plot plan, where the Registry would be mechanically looking for a town approval stamp on the plan before they were willing to record it.
But a new avenue has occurred to me that actually saves money on deed costs - nothing prevents multiple corporate entities from jointly owning a piece of real estate on one deed, right? So you could conceivably create one Delaware Series LLC, create an unlimited number of distinct legal entities with that, and then write one deed that lists all of those entities as joint owners of the single piece of real estate. Basically similar to multiple residents living in one house, and each getting a vote (but applied to infinitely scalable corporate entities!)
The fundamental flaw here is the law framing the entity itself as having voting rights (also why this attracts so much attention!), whereas if it were framed such that every beneficial owner with over say 35% of the ownership interest could vote, that would be intrinsically limiting.
singleshot_ 1 hours ago [-]
This idea is equally wrong for different reasons, but I do have a measure of appreciation for you having abandoned your first intrinsically broken idea upon the first resistance you encountered. Fail fast!
Why would thirty companies that owned a company together get one vote each instead of one thirtieth? The thirty companies would each have one vote in determining how to vote the one parent's vote.
(You are, however, correct to note that you can record absolute gibberish if you want to, so long as you pay the recorder. This does not effectuate a transfer of land, though; it merely serves as constructive notice to the person who is bound to look for such recorded notice, i.e., the beneficial purchaser for value. In a way, you could think of the function of a recorder as preventer of race conditions, not the database).
mindslight 55 minutes ago [-]
Well the choice was either accept the likelihood of a common restriction that seems to exist in many places, or dig into the actual specifics of the law in this Delaware county. I don't need to give myself a headache for fun.
Why would thirty companies each get a vote? Because that is what the charter says. There wouldn't be one parent company, rather the real estate would be owned by them all directly as tenants in common.
> 9. A. (2) Non-residents. Every property owner as of March 1 prior to the annual municipal election, whether a natural person or artificial entity, including but not limited to corporations, partnerships, trusts, and limited liability companies, and who is registered to vote, if provided by ordinance, shall have one (1) vote. A natural person shall be a citizen of the United States and age 18 on or before the date of the election. An artificial entity shall be a domestic entity in the State of Delaware.
So they must be Delaware entities. Another thing I'm giving up on is that the Series LLC might not work. While each Series is legally independent from the others, I think they still might not be considered distinct "entities" (once again, not looking to give myself a headache to solidly determine that).
So either do one LLC/corporation per vote, or perhaps trusts might be even cheaper (no idea what filing/recording would be required for trusts, especially to substantiate them enough to register to vote)
underlipton 8 hours ago [-]
You can't just split up an acre of land into square foot plots and sell them, so far.
davkan 11 hours ago [-]
Why become a lord in Scotland when you can become a voter in Delaware.
convolvatron 8 hours ago [-]
say I partitipate in .. 8 businesses in the district, and all of them are independent corporate entities that own the land they operate on. and each of them has multiple owners. I have some influence in the vote of all of these companies, and maybe we can even assume that most of the owners have similar views on things like property taxes in districts they don't reside in.
how many votes in that district do I have?
advisedwang 7 hours ago [-]
What right?
There is no right for non-residents of a city to vote in that city elections just because they own property there. Owning that property via a LLC shouldn't change that.
overfeed 7 hours ago [-]
Why can't corporations be toen councilors or mayors in those same towns? A privilege availed to other voters there.
I'm being sarcastic because I don't like it. Corporations are a simulacrum of people, and at best, their personhhood a useful legal fiction under very limited number of scenarios.
Hizonner 12 hours ago [-]
How about fuck absentee landlords, especially if they're not actually people?
Avicebron 12 hours ago [-]
Seriously, there should be exceptions for the rare case it's an actual person who can't go for an actual reaaon
righthand 13 hours ago [-]
And when my plot of land is co-owned by my 100 shell corporations?
cwmma 12 hours ago [-]
I don't think this is a good opinion or anything, but issues with vote dilution were expressly addressed in the opinion.
nh23423fefe 13 hours ago [-]
Why are you pretending this argument wasn't addressed in the opinion?
ceejayoz 13 hours ago [-]
But it wasn't, really.
> 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.
forgetfulness 12 hours ago [-]
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?
joshkel 12 hours ago [-]
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."
kulahan 9 hours ago [-]
Asbestos is still used today in some instances. Should’ve used heroin or something
ceejayoz 6 hours ago [-]
So is heroin.
SoftTalker 9 hours ago [-]
What would probably happen is that all the the owners of the property would have to designate one POA among themselves to represent their collective interest in that property.
rithdmc 12 hours ago [-]
I didn't see anything about this in the opinion.
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.
stefantalpalaru 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
John7878781 13 hours ago [-]
This sounds completely absurd. What's stopping me from starting up a bunch of LLCs or Trusts to rig the vote?
nh23423fefe 13 hours ago [-]
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.
pessimizer 12 hours ago [-]
The answer to the question asked is not here. Accusing somebody of seeing "visions" is not an answer, it is an evasion.
josefritzishere 12 hours ago [-]
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.
nh23423fefe 12 hours ago [-]
> a person gets to vote twice.
how do they do that?
Refreeze5224 12 hours ago [-]
The owner votes as themselves, and again as the corporate entity.
ceejayoz 12 hours ago [-]
No. Per the ruling:
> 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.
SoftTalker 9 hours ago [-]
The POA is to vote as a proxy for the entity. The entity gets one vote. Not one vote per shareholder.
setr 8 hours ago [-]
If you’re a shareholder in 5 companies, each owning 2 parcels of land, each with their own PoA, and you yourself hold land — then you have “influence” into 6 votes, though only direct ownership of 1 vote
pseudalopex 11 hours ago [-]
1 person 1 vote does not mean in each city where they own property.
ceejayoz 11 hours ago [-]
"One person, one vote" is clearly a per-race thing, or I'd violate it by voting for President and Senator at the same time.
pseudalopex 11 hours ago [-]
This did not refute what I said.
ceejayoz 11 hours ago [-]
You said:
> The owner votes as themselves, and again as the corporate entity.
Per the opinion, which I quoted above, this is not the case.
(I do think it gets instantly messy with multi-owner corporations, though.)
pseudalopex 11 hours ago [-]
Refreeze5224 said what you claimed I said.
You quoted Fenwick's charter. Where a voter is entitled to vote [in Fenwick] by virtue of being both a resident [in Fenwick] and as an owner of real property [in Fenwick], that voter shall be entitled to only one vote [in Fenwick]; where a voter is entitled to vote [in Fenwick] by ownership of two or more parcels of real property [in Fenwick], that voter shall be entitled to only one vote [in Fenwick]. You dispute this meaning?
The strongest plausible interpretation of josefritzishere and Refreeze5224 was the judge was wrong because voting in 2 places would violate 1 person 1 vote. Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.[1]
My town has a village at its core; village residents vote in two places.
Our school district doesn't perfectly match the town's borders, either, so some folks vote in two places there.
One person gets one vote in a particular election.
pseudalopex 9 hours ago [-]
This is not what people mean when they say vote in 2 places commonly. And I said 2 cities before.
1 person 1 vote is an expression of equal representation.[1] Someone who votes in city 1 and city 2 and someone who votes in city 1 solely have unequal representation.
Whoever dictates the company vote then votes for themselves.
cwmma 13 hours ago [-]
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.
ceejayoz 13 hours ago [-]
Wonder how long it is before there's a vote to allow the sale of inch-square lots.
NDlurker 12 hours ago [-]
Exactly. Same thing as offices set up to register out of state businesses.
12 hours ago [-]
mindslight 12 hours ago [-]
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]
SoftTalker 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Hugsbox 12 hours ago [-]
Which makes sense... why should anyone get a say in the local matters of a place they don't even live in?
SoftTalker 12 hours ago [-]
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.
EnergyAmy 10 hours ago [-]
If you want a say, live there.
shimman 10 hours ago [-]
I pay sales taxes in other cities I travel in, I too should get a say in how they run their government. Money, after all, is the top virtue in a democracy; if it wasn't why did the founders ensure that slavers had equal representation?
Supermancho 9 hours ago [-]
> Money, after all, is the top virtue in a democracy
"The Founders" of the US (however you want to form that category) were not the arbiters of what is virtuous about Democracy. Democracy is orthogonal to US law and intent. The PR for the US has always tried to message that they are a singular ethos.
SoftTalker 9 hours ago [-]
I would say the difference is that as a property owner I have a long-term local presence and vested interest there, I am (in theory) motivated to make thoughtful decisions about local governance, as opposed to a disinterested bystander passing through and paying local sales tax on a soft drink.
ryandrake 9 hours ago [-]
You can't have a presence if you're not present.
My parents own two properties, but they have to decide which one they are residents of, because they are not entitled to a say in how both local governments are run.
If I am a long-term owner of Google stock, I still don't get a say in how Mountain View runs their city. A "vested financial interest" in an area should not be enough to give one a vote on local laws.
nullocator 6 hours ago [-]
I guess the Walton family has a long-term local presence in basically every mid to large town and city in america. Same with Mcdonalds Corp. They have vested interests there (crushing competition, raising prices, lower quality, profit!). And their bigly profits certainly show a more significant vested interest as opposed to just a small property owner or worse a bystander or citizen.
rayiner 12 hours ago [-]
That’s a fair point, but the ACLU didn’t challenge that aspect of the municipal charter.
charcircuit 9 hours ago [-]
Because you have a vested interest in the success of that region by owning land (and a business) at that location. You have skin in the game compared to someone who is just renting and can easily flee to a different city if they vote poorly.
cucumber3732842 9 hours ago [-]
>renting and can easily flee to a different city if they vote poorly.
Nitpick:
I think you're correct that the problem is people who do selfish shortsighted things and leave others holding the bag but I think you are blaming the wrong people.
Pretty much everyone from Marx to MLK to Rand and Sowell identifies somme sort of class of "comfortable enough to meddle in things to further their self interest at everyone else's detriment" demographics as the root of a whole bunch of bad stuff.
In most municipalities middle class who are too tied into the place (often through home ownership) to just get out that provide the bulk of the political will to do short sighted "feels good" stuff that solves some minor problem they have but screws the whole place on a 20-50yr timeline (by which time the individuals responsible will have retired and cashed out to Idaho or Florida or whatever).
SkyPuncher 12 hours ago [-]
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.
cwmma 12 hours ago [-]
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.
mindslight 9 hours ago [-]
IANAA, but having looked into it this does very little to actually reduce the liability exposure from small businesses. The minute you do anything yourself, you start to accrue personal liability. The only way to keep the corporate veil intact is to hire other people. So it only works if you're rich enough to hire a management company to do everything (screen tenants, maintenance/inspections, supervise contractors, etc) and you manage it as a purely financial investment. Just like the anonymity aspect doesn't work out in most states unless you're willing to shell out for an attorney to be the manager. In general these laws aren't made to help little people.
9 hours ago [-]
dfxm12 13 hours ago [-]
A quick Google search suggests Fenwick Island has ~400 residents. The only thing stopping you would be someone else with more resources.
tekla 13 hours ago [-]
Should start a bunch of unions to rig the vote.
MattCruikshank 12 hours ago [-]
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.
ceejayoz 12 hours ago [-]
Senators can't veto, and filibusters require 40 other Senators to play ball.
The Constitution also overrides any attempt to prevent interstate migration.
bwestergard 12 hours ago [-]
"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?
ceejayoz 12 hours ago [-]
Sure, if we ignore how we get to "the sole landowner" scenario, which is a big hole in the thought experiment.
kjkjadksj 12 hours ago [-]
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...
swampthing 12 hours ago [-]
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.
rayiner 12 hours ago [-]
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.
swampthing 10 hours ago [-]
Thanks!
ProllyInfamous 11 hours ago [-]
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.
cco 9 hours ago [-]
This ruling is the exact opposite of the recent proposal from Hawaii.
That ruling is predicated on the state having control over corporations and how they behave. This ruling in Delaware is affirming a clear path for corporations to have control over the state (county, city etc).
With this ruling, it affirms a corporations ability to form air tight rule over municipal governments and operate them as they see fit. Once a corporation manufactures a majority vote in this municipality, they can then amend any rules they see fit, install their own executive leadership and have removed any corporate control over it.
In the thin sense these are both jurisdictions controlling how corporations behave, but one cedes complete control to corporations and the other vastly limits a corporation's ability to exert political control.
rayiner 13 hours ago [-]
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.
klaff 12 hours ago [-]
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.
rayiner 12 hours ago [-]
The town charter allows double voting in municipal elections because it allows non-residents to vote.
cucumber3732842 8 hours ago [-]
Having grown up in a tourism/2nd home town I think this is probably a good thing. Keeps the place from being totally captured by local business interests.
But it would likely lead to other problems because the owner demographics are generally out of touch.
pixl97 7 hours ago [-]
> Keeps the place from being totally captured by local business interests.
I'm pretty sure this is a fundimental design of the US system. There are things your city is allowed to do by state constitution. Things your county is allowed to do. And things only the state is allowed to do.
This is expressly to enable the people that live in that place the right to self governance.
craftkiller 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
BurningFrog 9 hours ago [-]
This is just a disagreement with the principle of free speech.
If you're only for free speech as long as it doesn't change people's minds, we have very different perspectives.
craftkiller 9 hours ago [-]
The issue isn't that people are trying to change people's minds. There are two issues here:
First, the rich have unimaginably more power in changing people's minds. This isn't sitting down at a bar and having a chat with hank to try to convince him to vote on prop 99. It is the wealthy putting their opinions on your phone, television, and billboards, reminding you of it multiple times per day. If politics is truly a contest of ideas, then the playing field needs to be level so that the ideas can be evaluated fairly, rather than it simply being a contest of who can buy enough ad space to brainwash people to vote against their interests.
Second, the wealthy don't have to change people's minds. They can purchase politicians by "donating" to them, going to million-dollar-per-plate dinners hosted by them, directly giving them money by staying in their hotels, etc. You don't have to convince a politician that they should vote on prop 99, you just need to pay them however much they want for their vote.
If the wealthy had exactly as much power in politics as a fireman or nurse, then I'd be all for their participation.
esikich 12 hours ago [-]
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?
Gormo 12 hours ago [-]
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.
wat10000 9 hours ago [-]
Why can't both of those be true? I don't see any contradiction between them. The law doesn't seem to have any issue taking them both as true either. Corporations are considered their own entity under the law, but they do not enjoy all the rights of people. The whole reason this story is making headlines instead of being a humdrum "dog bites man" event is because corporations typically do not have the right to vote, even though people mostly do.
Henchman21 11 hours ago [-]
It _seems true_ when the people represented by the organizational model never face consequences for their actions, using the corporation as a liability shield.
So while corporations aren't people, they do seem to be exercising autonomous agency as singular entities distinct from the people who constitute them. Because by definition that is what a limited liability corporation provides? It seems that this is the crux of a lot of angst?
Gormo 9 hours ago [-]
> It _seems true_ when the people represented by the organizational model never face consequences for their actions, using the corporation as a liability shield.
Corporations don't function as a liability shield in the sense you're talking about. The idea that people can individually engage in criminal or tortious conduct without any direct accountability is a myth -- limited liability protects investors from financial liabilities that exceed their investment, but it in no way shields corporate managers from liability for their own criminal conduct in managing the firm.
> So while corporations aren't people, they do seem to be exercising autonomous agency as singular entities distinct from the people who constitute them. Because by definition that is what a limited liability corporation provides?
No, it does not do that in any way, shape or form. Limited liability means that creditors can't foreclose on your house to cover the debts of a firm that you own $100 of stock in. It does not shield anyone actually managing the company from civil or criminal liability for their actions.
> It seems that this is the crux of a lot of angst?
That angst is attributable to believing in misinformation pushed advanced by factions who benefit from increasing conflict and controversy in our society.
Henchman21 9 hours ago [-]
Excellent reply thank you!
So why then does it seem that corporations do in fact shield executives from criminal charges? Is this just collusion among the well-off? Money buys verdicts?
I’m happy to take your word on limited liability as IANAL (obviously) but it sure as hell seems like executives ought to go to jail a LOT more than they do. Corporations do terrible things in the world and are seemingly never held to account.
Finally, looking to my own education, can you suggest a place to read up on this topic so I am not flatly wrong in the future? Thx in advance :)
underlipton 5 hours ago [-]
Laymen here: my guess would be that the financial and social resources corporate representatives have access to (both personally and through the entity that has a vested interest in them not going to jail) make the prospect of prosecuting them for criminal misconduct unappetizing. It would be a lot of time and money to send people with a lot of powerful friends to jail for a handful of years, at best. As a prosecutor, what's better for your career: that, or spending significantly fewer resources putting street-level criminals in prison for 5, 10, 20 years?
The issues at hand seem distinct but related.
esikich 9 hours ago [-]
Those people can already vote. I have no idea what your point is.
EnergyAmy 9 hours ago [-]
The contradiction clears up when you realize that corporations are legal fiction without rights, merely privileges granted to them.
You can act in your capacity as a person and exercise your rights, taking on personal liability.
You can act via a fictive legal proxy, which has no rights and shield yourself from some liability.
Trying to blur those two is madness.
rayiner 12 hours ago [-]
No, but the people who own and control the corporation all do.
EnergyAmy 9 hours ago [-]
They can vote and act in their capacity as people. They can fuck off otherwise.
SkyPuncher 12 hours ago [-]
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.
abejfehr 12 hours ago [-]
> ... they won’t want rich people to vote.
I think it might be more than that
pavon 9 hours ago [-]
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.
trinsic2 12 hours ago [-]
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.
folkrav 11 hours ago [-]
"Corporations are controlled by humans, therefore critics are motivated by anti-rich sentiment" is definitely a take
bit-anarchist 5 hours ago [-]
Where did the "therefore" come from? From OP's comment it didn't, that's for sure.
wat10000 12 hours ago [-]
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.
rayiner 12 hours ago [-]
Because the municipal charter in question confers to vote on the property owner. Which might technically be a corporation.
wat10000 12 hours ago [-]
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?
rayiner 12 hours ago [-]
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?
ceejayoz 12 hours ago [-]
> Why should they have to choose between the benefits of the corporate structure and exercising the rights the municipality has given property owners?
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.
rayiner 11 hours ago [-]
> They're trading one benefit for another
Why? What’s the logical basis for this idea that they should have to choose between these benefits?
ceejayoz 11 hours ago [-]
What's the logical basis for this idea that LLCs should have more benefits than an individual homeowner but give up nothing in return?
EnergyAmy 9 hours ago [-]
Because corporations aren't people. Full stop.
bit-anarchist 5 hours ago [-]
To the extent that is relevant to law and ethics, they are. Juridical people, as it goes.
tiahura 12 hours ago [-]
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.
wat10000 12 hours ago [-]
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.
rayiner 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
wat10000 12 hours ago [-]
"Protections of the corporate form"? You mean they aren't just proxies?
rayiner 12 hours ago [-]
The fact that the corporate form has other benefits doesn’t mean that the corporations aren’t proxies for the purposes relevant here.
wat10000 10 hours ago [-]
Likewise, the fact that corporations act as proxies in some ways doesn't mean that they must act as proxies for votes.
Obviously, the court has ruled that they do in fact act that way. But we're talking about what should be, not what is.
The question of whether corporate owners of residences should be able to vote in this town is not at all obvious, certainly doesn't merit dismissal with a glib "corporations are just proxies." They aren't just proxies. In some respects they are, in others they aren't. If they were nothing but proxies then there'd be no point to them.
malcolmgreaves 12 hours ago [-]
Got ‘em!
mschuster91 11 hours ago [-]
> I want rayiner to spell it out for me, because that "a corporation is just a proxy" line is 100% horseshit.
Not the original author, but generically, there are a few reasons why one would place a residential property in a distinct legal entity.
Most commonly it's to shield a property against others - spouses, children or other relatives with legal inheritance claims, especially if the jurisdiction in question treats corporate ownership more favorably to the goal of the person in question than they treat real estate ownership. In some cases, cough Rene Benko, the aim is to have a corporate veil against the government or creditors, although more commonly a trust is the chosen vehicle instead of a corporation.
The other way around is rare, but also works - the legal entity caps your exposure. Think of, say, your house catches fire due to shoddy electrical works. Some dumbass neighbor kid climbs over a fence, drowns in your pool and is barely rescued in time, but their brain is now fried for good and the kid will need 80 years in intensive assisted living. You own your home outright? All of your other wealth can be seized now to make the neighbors whole. However, if a LLC owns that home, your exposure is now limited to the value of the home - the LLC goes bankrupt, the house is sold off with the proceeds going to the neighbors, you can keep the rest of your wealth.
wat10000 9 hours ago [-]
Right. And maybe in exchange for that, you don't get a non-resident vote anymore. That doesn't sound outrageous to me. If the LLC were a pure proxy then none of these advantages would apply. It makes sense that there might be some tradeoffs involved.
tiahura 12 hours ago [-]
When I hear people grouse about the concept corporate rights, I always ask them why they hate New York Times _Co._ v. Sullivan.
ceejayoz 12 hours ago [-]
And they scratch your head and say "but... that ruling applies to regular people, like NYT staff and you and me."
It simply sets a high standard for proving defamation claims by public figures.
rayiner 12 hours ago [-]
“NYT” staff don’t publish the paper, the corporation does.
ceejayoz 12 hours ago [-]
Irrelevant.
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.
rayiner 12 hours ago [-]
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.
ceejayoz 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
rayiner 11 hours ago [-]
> The corporate nature of its target is, again, entirely irrelevant.
Why? In New York Times v. Sullivan, the corporation was being sued for what it did. The New York Times reporter didn’t print and distribute all those newspapers. The corporation did that.
And what you’re calling “tortured logic” was in fact the government’s argument in Citizens United. It argued that it wasn’t regulating the filmmaker. It was regulating the corporation spending funds to make and distribute the film. So it sounds like we agree Citizens United was correctly decided!
ceejayoz 11 hours ago [-]
> In New York Times v. Sullivan, the corporation was being sued for what it did.
And its status as a corporation was irrelevant to the result. If it was @ceejayoz v. Sullivan, the ruling would've been the same.
> So it sounds like we agree Citizens United was correctly decided!
There's that torturing again. I believe CU illegitimately impacts the voting rights of American citizens.
EnergyAmy 9 hours ago [-]
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.
Hizonner 12 hours ago [-]
... 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.
condis 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
12 hours ago [-]
booleanbetrayal 10 hours ago [-]
I don't understand how this thread went from something like #10 on the main page down to #186 in a matter of an hour, despite being more active than most of the threads it is competing with. Can someone more familiar with HN rankings explain this one to me?
pseudalopex 10 hours ago [-]
Submissions with too many comments for their votes receive a penalty. This is to stop flame wars.
booleanbetrayal 10 hours ago [-]
I suppose that could make sense. It's still rather unfortunate, as this is a concerning development that could probably use some more awareness around it.
mrguyorama 8 hours ago [-]
This system was designed decades ago "To stop flamewars" and not been changed or fixed or improved in any way despite a drastically changing internet and world.
The purpose of a system is what it does, especially when chances to change or improve that system are ignored.
Similarly, HN is for "interesting discussion" which is why "politics is banned" even though it is explicitly not because the one time we tried to literally ban politics it was self evident how stupid, unworkable, and self defeating of a policy it is, and it lead to zero "interesting discussion", but whatever hype fad is popular right now fills the entire board to capacity at all times, with nothing more than the standard talking points either way, and somehow the 37th post about "AI slop but by a different Substack account nobody has heard of before" is interesting discussion.
"Too many comments for their votes", which is not made transparent to us because god forbid we understand why things happen in our community.
DarkNova6 13 hours ago [-]
Corporate representation in UNO when?
davidw 12 hours ago [-]
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.
SoftTalker 12 hours ago [-]
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.
rho138 9 hours ago [-]
ofc it’s Fenwick Island - it’s a mix of brainrot tourons and “tread on me harder daddy” closeted republicans.
Source: local
ryeights 13 hours ago [-]
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…
I hope we can agree that allowing corporations to vote in any kind of political process is taking corporate personhood too far
rayiner 12 hours ago [-]
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.
bluefirebrand 11 hours ago [-]
Because owning a corporation becomes a way for you to vote twice, once on your own behalf, once on behalf of your corporation.
This seems like an obvious problem
soco 12 hours ago [-]
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.
rayiner 12 hours ago [-]
The charter in question has allowed non-resident voting since the 1950s.
klaff 12 hours ago [-]
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.
black6 13 hours ago [-]
If I own property in multiple municipalities/states, then I should be able to vote in all of them on local issues.
samwiseg 12 hours ago [-]
Absolutely not. If you don’t live there, then your vote shouldn’t matter as much as someone who does live there.
postflopclarity 13 hours ago [-]
that's a different legal question than the one here.
toast0 12 hours ago [-]
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.
postflopclarity 11 hours ago [-]
correct. and the comment I replied to is about allowing voting for non-resident property owners when the ownership IS held by a natural person.
toast0 11 hours ago [-]
The poster did not indicate how they hold their ownership. Many people hold their real estate indirectly; a trust is common; if I read the opiniom correctly, a majority of properties in the municipality in question are held in trust.
yesfitz 12 hours ago [-]
Why?
Henchman21 11 hours ago [-]
Nice assertion. No. You should be able to vote where you live. Full stop. Nothing else. You don't get more than one vote.
akramachamarei 8 hours ago [-]
What about the notion of No Taxation without Representation? With that in mind, shouldn't you get to vote wherever you are (substantially) taxed?
Henchman21 6 hours ago [-]
No. One person, one vote, with registration tied to where you live.
Now, to discuss No Taxation Without Representation: we haven’t had proper representation since the number of representatives in the house was capped because we ran out of space for more chairs, so personally I consider that ship has sailed. I would love to get back to a place where We The People had representation. Alas we do not. Let’s start by addressing the absolutely absurd chair problem.
akramachamarei 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah that would be good to address too. I wonder if we'd end up with vertically stacked Representatives like in Star Wars.
Henchman21 4 hours ago [-]
Well, if we're going to go all Star Wars with it, let's elect some kids to office. Smart kids. Kids with a sense of justice and fairness. But yes, I expect a sphere might be the best layout. Like King Arthur's Round Table, there is no head or foot.
jauntywundrkind 13 hours ago [-]
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...
mindslight 13 hours ago [-]
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).
NDlurker 12 hours ago [-]
So I buy one parcel of land and then split off ownership to each of the 400 entities I created? Crazy
king_geedorah 12 hours ago [-]
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.
chuckadams 12 hours ago [-]
I have to imagine that's an OpenClaw workflow by now.
12 hours ago [-]
chuckadams 12 hours ago [-]
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.
tiahura 12 hours ago [-]
all corporations ultimately resolve down to individuals. either the shareholders or the board.
ceejayoz 11 hours ago [-]
The point of an limited liability company is to limit that aspect substantially.
josefritzishere 12 hours ago [-]
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others".
condis 13 hours ago [-]
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8cvor6j844qw_d6 13 hours ago [-]
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.
SoftTalker 12 hours ago [-]
Do you care enough about the local governance of the Town of Fenwick Island to do this?
booleanbetrayal 12 hours ago [-]
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bitbytebane 13 hours ago [-]
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yieldcrv 13 hours ago [-]
> 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
Gives more details on the ability of companies to vote in City of London elections.
tialaramex 12 hours ago [-]
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. ]]
josefritzishere 12 hours ago [-]
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.
yieldcrv 11 hours ago [-]
Fascinating news for you is that nobody is saying any of those things.
I said, and factually, that voting power is held by corporations within those states, just like within this town in Delaware. Nothing to do with what you wrote about semantics of the state’s own incorporation reality or fiction
bitwize 13 hours ago [-]
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.
rayiner 13 hours ago [-]
What do “Republicans” have to do with this? This is Delaware. Everyone in this story is a Democrat.
rho138 9 hours ago [-]
Incorrect - this is southern delaware homie. While the northern portions enjoy the storied histories of great Delawareans like Harriett Tubman, the rest is a mix of that and some who’d prefer a more sterile white future.
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.
mindslight 12 hours ago [-]
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).
rayiner 12 hours ago [-]
Except we’re talking about Delaware, which is totally controlled by Democrats who also cater to corporations.
mindslight 12 hours ago [-]
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.
rayiner 12 hours ago [-]
My point is that the example you’ve chosen to highlight is a major counter example that undermines your broader narrative.
mindslight 9 hours ago [-]
I haven't highlighted anything here. I actually characterized the original comment as a "low effort partisan comment".
This development is also not a counter example - Both parties routinely do the bidding of corporate entrenched interests, but they market it in different ways. So an instance of Democrats advancing the corporatist agenda isn't some gotcha like you're making it out to be.
Though perhaps by "undermine" you just mean it's something for other partisans to latch onto to support their own rationalizations rather than coming to terms with that "broader narrative".
recursivecaveat 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
jmward01 9 hours ago [-]
The problem with companies being treated like people is that they are only afforded the -good- aspects and not the -bad- ones. This is an out for the rich to become 'more equal' by owning companies and having expanded rights that the average person doesn't. If this is really just a delegation of rights then fine. One vote, one person that is actually eligible, and not by right of them owning that company, for that vote explicitly delegates that one instance of that right. Same with campaign finance and all the other 'good parts' companies are getting without the bad parts. If these companies really are people then why aren't they actually being thrown in jail when they commit crimes? Why aren't they on death row when they kill people for money? Rights without responsibility and repercussions is tyranny since -some actual person- is now forced to feel that responsibility and the repercussions that this company pushed off.
Company towns are well-recorded history, not science fiction. Lost Hills California (home of Wonderful Pistachios) exists in the real, present, non-fictional world.
The same thing can be said about any autocratic government, but the practical and documented historical issues are why they are not liked. Just as dictatorship works well when you have a good ruler who cares about the people, the issue isn't if you get a bad ruler, but when.
Unsurprisingly, it did not last.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C4%81na%CA%BBi
Sure you can. You just have to sell them some land as part of it.
What is the smallest subplot you can split a parcel into?
And are we talking literally land, or would condo ownership suffice? (After all, you typically stack a few condos on top of one parcel of land). The smallest condo is probably dictated by some pesky human habitability rules, but what class of property has the fewest minimum-square-footage zoning rules? Retail probably has egress rules, but what about industrial spaces?
Could you create an industrial park to house a bunch of, to use a rough metaphor, independently-owned/independently-operated phone booths (or whatever other "qualifying use")?
Basically is there a category of land-use you could split ownership off at ridiculous scale, offer LLC-as-a-service to buy a bunch of them, and just for fun, tokenize the votes to provably aggregate the absentee ballots at scale via blockchain?
If it's one-entity-one-vote, what is the most cost-effective way to maximize the number of qualifying entities?
Bonus points for every order of magnitude of synthetic votes you can reasonably achieve over the fleshy variety.
Where I am, things like dividing a 5 acre rural property so that a mother-in-law can live in a cottage near her family are routinely denied.
Let me save you some words.
Next time just call them "the local real estate developer slime balls" because that's who makes up the vase majority of these organizations. Like maybe a particularly upstanding town might have a local banker or lawyer on one of the boards or something.
These are not democratic institutions. They are business groups that happen to be part of government.
These organizations are already in the pocket of business interests. If anything this change is destabilizing because it now means that the PE owned car-wash and the company that owns a bunch of chain franchise businesses in the town as well as every local business that owns land or the landlords thereof but is owned by people who live in the surrounding towns can push back and say "screw you, we're not all willing to bend over and take it so you can make another buck developing another street of McMansions".
Letting megacorps vote is probably bad. But I think we should see where this goes. There's a lot of "enemy of my enemy" potential here for the currently disenfrachinsed business interests to push back on the business interests that are in bed with government to the benifit of the people. Enemy of my enemy is my ally and all that.
An acre, here. See your local zoning code or land statutes for minimum lot sizes. Consult agreements that run with the land for additional restrictions.
This is kind of a violation of the "one man one vote" ideal that is the bedrock of our society. It easily turns in to "money buys influence" which is exactly the opposite of what made the US a great country to live in. If you don't understand that and you're a US Citizen you should really retake the civics / political science classes from high school.
The judge effectively said in the conclusion "Trust me, there's no abuse and this is fine".
It would be void and regardless of recordation, no transfer or subdivision would have occurred.
But a new avenue has occurred to me that actually saves money on deed costs - nothing prevents multiple corporate entities from jointly owning a piece of real estate on one deed, right? So you could conceivably create one Delaware Series LLC, create an unlimited number of distinct legal entities with that, and then write one deed that lists all of those entities as joint owners of the single piece of real estate. Basically similar to multiple residents living in one house, and each getting a vote (but applied to infinitely scalable corporate entities!)
The fundamental flaw here is the law framing the entity itself as having voting rights (also why this attracts so much attention!), whereas if it were framed such that every beneficial owner with over say 35% of the ownership interest could vote, that would be intrinsically limiting.
Why would thirty companies that owned a company together get one vote each instead of one thirtieth? The thirty companies would each have one vote in determining how to vote the one parent's vote.
(You are, however, correct to note that you can record absolute gibberish if you want to, so long as you pay the recorder. This does not effectuate a transfer of land, though; it merely serves as constructive notice to the person who is bound to look for such recorded notice, i.e., the beneficial purchaser for value. In a way, you could think of the function of a recorder as preventer of race conditions, not the database).
Why would thirty companies each get a vote? Because that is what the charter says. There wouldn't be one parent company, rather the real estate would be owned by them all directly as tenants in common.
> 9. A. (2) Non-residents. Every property owner as of March 1 prior to the annual municipal election, whether a natural person or artificial entity, including but not limited to corporations, partnerships, trusts, and limited liability companies, and who is registered to vote, if provided by ordinance, shall have one (1) vote. A natural person shall be a citizen of the United States and age 18 on or before the date of the election. An artificial entity shall be a domestic entity in the State of Delaware.
https://charters.delaware.gov/fenwickisland.html
So they must be Delaware entities. Another thing I'm giving up on is that the Series LLC might not work. While each Series is legally independent from the others, I think they still might not be considered distinct "entities" (once again, not looking to give myself a headache to solidly determine that).
So either do one LLC/corporation per vote, or perhaps trusts might be even cheaper (no idea what filing/recording would be required for trusts, especially to substantiate them enough to register to vote)
how many votes in that district do I have?
There is no right for non-residents of a city to vote in that city elections just because they own property there. Owning that property via a LLC shouldn't change that.
I'm being sarcastic because I don't like it. Corporations are a simulacrum of people, and at best, their personhhood a useful legal fiction under very limited number of scenarios.
> 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.
> The owner votes as themselves, and again as the corporate entity.
Per the opinion, which I quoted above, this is not the case.
(I do think it gets instantly messy with multi-owner corporations, though.)
You quoted Fenwick's charter. Where a voter is entitled to vote [in Fenwick] by virtue of being both a resident [in Fenwick] and as an owner of real property [in Fenwick], that voter shall be entitled to only one vote [in Fenwick]; where a voter is entitled to vote [in Fenwick] by ownership of two or more parcels of real property [in Fenwick], that voter shall be entitled to only one vote [in Fenwick]. You dispute this meaning?
Refreeze5224 did not say in Fenwick.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48295844
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My town has a village at its core; village residents vote in two places.
Our school district doesn't perfectly match the town's borders, either, so some folks vote in two places there.
One person gets one vote in a particular election.
1 person 1 vote is an expression of equal representation.[1] Someone who votes in city 1 and city 2 and someone who votes in city 1 solely have unequal representation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man%2C_one_vote
"The Founders" of the US (however you want to form that category) were not the arbiters of what is virtuous about Democracy. Democracy is orthogonal to US law and intent. The PR for the US has always tried to message that they are a singular ethos.
My parents own two properties, but they have to decide which one they are residents of, because they are not entitled to a say in how both local governments are run.
If I am a long-term owner of Google stock, I still don't get a say in how Mountain View runs their city. A "vested financial interest" in an area should not be enough to give one a vote on local laws.
Nitpick:
I think you're correct that the problem is people who do selfish shortsighted things and leave others holding the bag but I think you are blaming the wrong people.
Pretty much everyone from Marx to MLK to Rand and Sowell identifies somme sort of class of "comfortable enough to meddle in things to further their self interest at everyone else's detriment" demographics as the root of a whole bunch of bad stuff.
In most municipalities middle class who are too tied into the place (often through home ownership) to just get out that provide the bulk of the political will to do short sighted "feels good" stuff that solves some minor problem they have but screws the whole place on a 20-50yr timeline (by which time the individuals responsible will have retired and cashed out to Idaho or Florida or whatever).
* 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...
That ruling is predicated on the state having control over corporations and how they behave. This ruling in Delaware is affirming a clear path for corporations to have control over the state (county, city etc).
With this ruling, it affirms a corporations ability to form air tight rule over municipal governments and operate them as they see fit. Once a corporation manufactures a majority vote in this municipality, they can then amend any rules they see fit, install their own executive leadership and have removed any corporate control over it.
In the thin sense these are both jurisdictions controlling how corporations behave, but one cedes complete control to corporations and the other vastly limits a corporation's ability to exert political control.
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.
But it would likely lead to other problems because the owner demographics are generally out of touch.
I'm pretty sure this is a fundimental design of the US system. There are things your city is allowed to do by state constitution. Things your county is allowed to do. And things only the state is allowed to do.
This is expressly to enable the people that live in that place the right to self governance.
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.
If you're only for free speech as long as it doesn't change people's minds, we have very different perspectives.
First, the rich have unimaginably more power in changing people's minds. This isn't sitting down at a bar and having a chat with hank to try to convince him to vote on prop 99. It is the wealthy putting their opinions on your phone, television, and billboards, reminding you of it multiple times per day. If politics is truly a contest of ideas, then the playing field needs to be level so that the ideas can be evaluated fairly, rather than it simply being a contest of who can buy enough ad space to brainwash people to vote against their interests.
Second, the wealthy don't have to change people's minds. They can purchase politicians by "donating" to them, going to million-dollar-per-plate dinners hosted by them, directly giving them money by staying in their hotels, etc. You don't have to convince a politician that they should vote on prop 99, you just need to pay them however much they want for their vote.
If the wealthy had exactly as much power in politics as a fireman or nurse, then I'd be all for their participation.
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.
So while corporations aren't people, they do seem to be exercising autonomous agency as singular entities distinct from the people who constitute them. Because by definition that is what a limited liability corporation provides? It seems that this is the crux of a lot of angst?
Corporations don't function as a liability shield in the sense you're talking about. The idea that people can individually engage in criminal or tortious conduct without any direct accountability is a myth -- limited liability protects investors from financial liabilities that exceed their investment, but it in no way shields corporate managers from liability for their own criminal conduct in managing the firm.
> So while corporations aren't people, they do seem to be exercising autonomous agency as singular entities distinct from the people who constitute them. Because by definition that is what a limited liability corporation provides?
No, it does not do that in any way, shape or form. Limited liability means that creditors can't foreclose on your house to cover the debts of a firm that you own $100 of stock in. It does not shield anyone actually managing the company from civil or criminal liability for their actions.
> It seems that this is the crux of a lot of angst?
That angst is attributable to believing in misinformation pushed advanced by factions who benefit from increasing conflict and controversy in our society.
So why then does it seem that corporations do in fact shield executives from criminal charges? Is this just collusion among the well-off? Money buys verdicts?
I’m happy to take your word on limited liability as IANAL (obviously) but it sure as hell seems like executives ought to go to jail a LOT more than they do. Corporations do terrible things in the world and are seemingly never held to account.
Finally, looking to my own education, can you suggest a place to read up on this topic so I am not flatly wrong in the future? Thx in advance :)
The issues at hand seem distinct but related.
You can act in your capacity as a person and exercise your rights, taking on personal liability.
You can act via a fictive legal proxy, which has no rights and shield yourself from some liability.
Trying to blur those two is madness.
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.
I think it might be more than that
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.
Why? What’s the logical basis for this idea that they should have to choose between these benefits?
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.
Obviously, the court has ruled that they do in fact act that way. But we're talking about what should be, not what is.
The question of whether corporate owners of residences should be able to vote in this town is not at all obvious, certainly doesn't merit dismissal with a glib "corporations are just proxies." They aren't just proxies. In some respects they are, in others they aren't. If they were nothing but proxies then there'd be no point to them.
Not the original author, but generically, there are a few reasons why one would place a residential property in a distinct legal entity.
Most commonly it's to shield a property against others - spouses, children or other relatives with legal inheritance claims, especially if the jurisdiction in question treats corporate ownership more favorably to the goal of the person in question than they treat real estate ownership. In some cases, cough Rene Benko, the aim is to have a corporate veil against the government or creditors, although more commonly a trust is the chosen vehicle instead of a corporation.
The other way around is rare, but also works - the legal entity caps your exposure. Think of, say, your house catches fire due to shoddy electrical works. Some dumbass neighbor kid climbs over a fence, drowns in your pool and is barely rescued in time, but their brain is now fried for good and the kid will need 80 years in intensive assisted living. You own your home outright? All of your other wealth can be seized now to make the neighbors whole. However, if a LLC owns that home, your exposure is now limited to the value of the home - the LLC goes bankrupt, the house is sold off with the proceeds going to the neighbors, you can keep the rest of your wealth.
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.
Why? In New York Times v. Sullivan, the corporation was being sued for what it did. The New York Times reporter didn’t print and distribute all those newspapers. The corporation did that.
And what you’re calling “tortured logic” was in fact the government’s argument in Citizens United. It argued that it wasn’t regulating the filmmaker. It was regulating the corporation spending funds to make and distribute the film. So it sounds like we agree Citizens United was correctly decided!
And its status as a corporation was irrelevant to the result. If it was @ceejayoz v. Sullivan, the ruling would've been the same.
> So it sounds like we agree Citizens United was correctly decided!
There's that torturing again. I believe CU illegitimately impacts the voting rights of American citizens.
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.
... 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.
The purpose of a system is what it does, especially when chances to change or improve that system are ignored.
Similarly, HN is for "interesting discussion" which is why "politics is banned" even though it is explicitly not because the one time we tried to literally ban politics it was self evident how stupid, unworkable, and self defeating of a policy it is, and it lead to zero "interesting discussion", but whatever hype fad is popular right now fills the entire board to capacity at all times, with nothing more than the standard talking points either way, and somehow the 37th post about "AI slop but by a different Substack account nobody has heard of before" is interesting discussion.
"Too many comments for their votes", which is not made transparent to us because god forbid we understand why things happen in our community.
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.
Source: local
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.
This seems like an obvious problem
Now, to discuss No Taxation Without Representation: we haven’t had proper representation since the number of representatives in the house was capped because we ran out of space for more chairs, so personally I consider that ship has sailed. I would love to get back to a place where We The People had representation. Alas we do not. Let’s start by addressing the absolutely absurd chair 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
Gives more details on the ability of companies to vote in City of London elections.
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. ]]
I said, and factually, that voting power is held by corporations within those states, just like within this town in Delaware. Nothing to do with what you wrote about semantics of the state’s own incorporation reality or fiction
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.
This development is also not a counter example - Both parties routinely do the bidding of corporate entrenched interests, but they market it in different ways. So an instance of Democrats advancing the corporatist agenda isn't some gotcha like you're making it out to be.
Though perhaps by "undermine" you just mean it's something for other partisans to latch onto to support their own rationalizations rather than coming to terms with that "broader narrative".
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.