Bill to allow corporate landowners to vote in elections in Seaford, Delaware
legis.delaware.gov
legis.delaware.gov
It's one town of 8,000 people trying to allow non-residents who own property through LLCs still vote.
It might be bad, but the title feels misleading to me.
From another comment [1]:
> In Newark, Delaware’s third-biggest city, a similar rule allowed one property manager to vote 31 times in a local referendum in 2018, one for each of the LLCs their company owned
https://www.promarket.org/2022/05/23/delaware-the-state-wher...
It really boggles the mind how ignorant Americans are of basic civics. Just the other day I saw a generally knowledgeable law YouTuber state that rights are "granted by the government" which can't be further from the truth in the US.
thats what the good document promises, not quite what plays out in real life
Yeah, this is a disconcerting trend that I've observed too. Do you this think could be an issue that's always existed at the same levels and is now easier to observe due to the window of social media (and looks like a trend), or do you think it's something new?
That is because the Bill of Rights form the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, the preamble of which opens thusly:
"We the people of the United States,"[1]
That literature has been interpreted by the courts as the Constitution only applying to United States citizens.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preamble_to_the_United_States_...
Obligatory IANAL.
"For some reason" seems like a fair description of that. It's not explicitly said, the closest is "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."
And "We the people" is talking about who wrote it, I don't get how one can claim that bit is who it applies to.
I get the arguments made to do this, to me they seem clearly against the spirit of the Bill of Rights/Founding Fathers, something we generally hold to be sacrosanct.
No, but while some students can benefit from the internet in general for school, I'm convinced keeping a socially-expected Skinner box on one's person every waking hour is not great in general. More specifically, learning complex, multi-faceted, and important topics while (attempting to) ignore the Skinner box is not good for any subject that is not, or cannot be, subjected to standardized testing - and many subjects that are.
There is no protection from the election being setup in such a way that your votes are diluted by some other set of votes.
In my imagination, the first thing Mayor Blackrock 9754 LLC will do is approve a referendum to phase out residential zoning for new developments, next comes the requisite Japanese tech corps, holographic ads and perpetual night. I never imagined this would be set in Delaware - but it sort of tracks.
The constitution leaves qualifications for voting up to the states. If Delaware allows corporations to in certain state elections, it would follow that they’d be able to vote for congressional seats as well.
From article 1:
>The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.
Specifically, the 14th amendment's equal protection clause is seen to apply to voting rights (of which apportionment is perhaps the most unclear, but literally giving individuals multiple votes, as opposed to different weights is sort of a beyond obvious violation).
You'd be more likely to tune to your local classical station and hear techno. It'd be that out of character
Go listen to the 150 or so episodes of the 5-4 podcast for lots of examples
Legally? No.
However, the idea of a construct being deemed a person makes no sense given how we define what a person is.
Further, having essentially broken that definition, we have opened the door for all sorts of crazy legal things to happen! Anything can be a person. Anything can be anything, taken to extremes.
In addition to voting issues you mention, having the corporation as person means some of us have agency others do not due to how we operate companies. The owners have a shield for all sorts of otherwise expensive and risky behavior. Great as well as evil actions are possible, affordable and it is not necessary we allow these things.
I see it as very harmful.
What makes you so confident that things are going to change?
The title is perfectly fine. It's literally a Delaware bill. I don't know what world you're living in, but it's not the same one as me.
That is obviously not the case. Are we in the business of clickbait and fake news around these parts?
Let’s say you live in Baltimore but also own a house in a small resort town. In Delaware, that town can decide to let you vote in Baltimore and at your vacation home.
Legally they do this by saying city elections are open to both residents and property owners (regardless of where they live).
That all seems pretty reasonable for small resort towns. But a lot of property is owned by trusts, llcs, and corporations. So this would include those property owners as well.
For steelmanning what, and what argument or rebuttal are they making?
> Most of the other comments resolve to textual downvotes.
What does this mean?
Maybe but I can imagine locals who live there full time having problems getting city see that a guy who lives there 3 weeks a year doesn’t care about.
There is a balance of interests. That doesn’t mean anyone not somewhere all the time should get zero representation. This is part of finding that balance.
Literally what? If this isn't the meaningless bullshit it sounds like, I will be stunned.
After Citizens United I wouldn't be surprised at all if eventually corporate federal vote happened.
>in fact it never was. The Electoral College, the Senate, the Supreme Court ensures this.
Note my use of the word modern. All of those (elected) institutions are ossified in place due to the herculean effort it would take to modify them. They are products of a time when that was very much not a settled value in the United States.
[0]https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/one-person_one-vote_rule
Note that as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, such rules allow people who own multiple LLCs to vote multiple times in the same election, in the same jurisdiction.
And how much it helped roe v wade not being overturned? Case law is fine and dandy until there is political will to overturn it. Then it only matters what political opinion have majority there. And it always was some flavour of right(D or R).
The roe precedent was not on nearly as firm of ground.
Though your overall point is still obviously correct, at the end of the day the court is a political institution ruled over by 9 unelected individuals.
> All of those (elected) institutions
Excuse me but neither the Electoral College nor the Supreme Court is elected.
I wrote “(elected)” to explicitly exclude the Supreme Court from my statement.
I am against the EC as well, but it isn’t representative of modern notions of democracy in America. As I said, it exists as little more than an anachronism.
But if you have multiple citizenship you can vote in multiple countries, for instance.
And in this case being able to vote in two municipalities at the municipal level only isn't a violation of one person, one vote.
On the other hand, if they allowed a single owner of multiple LLC's to vote once for each LLC, that certainly becomes questionable. But another HN comment here indicates the text of the bill specifically disallows that.
> In Newark, Delaware’s third-biggest city, a similar rule allowed one property manager to vote 31 times in a local referendum in 2018, one for each of the LLCs their company owned
https://www.promarket.org/2022/05/23/delaware-the-state-wher...
IANAL, but the main thing they I've heard they provide corporations is legal stability via their court system. Since just about every major corporation is registered in Delaware, they have precedent for just about every goofy b2b contract dispute. This allows for two very nice effects: 1) predictability about how cases will go if they hit the courts; 2) the court system tends to work very quickly when there is a dispute.
A good recent example of this was Elon Musk's dispute around purchasing twitter. Musk very obviously didn't want the deal to go through, twitter filed suit in mid july, and just three months they were a day before trial and Musk decided to buy the company as twitter was demanding. Musk ostensibly had every reason to delay as long as possible, with essentially unbounded amounts of resources to do so, and all with what sounds like a pretty goofy contract. A great example of a complex-ish b2b contract problem working it's way very quickly through the system (ie. going to trial within three months), and leaving both sides sure enough at that point of the final outcome to solve their problem without actually going to trial.
Great system for inter-corporate stability.
I think every person should have a say in the laws where they live, and that includes where they work. Sadly most people get one vote based on one address
In Melbourne, Australia, the local government that covers the downtown area and a few surrounding suburbs gives 2 votes to businesses and 1 vote to residents. Guess what kind of policy exists? Highly pro business, growing inequality for residents.
uh, but it's not
the worker has the vote
(and I say this as one of them)
There is, and in it a tradeoff. The businesses will prioritise growth over liveability and working conditions. Workers working conditions; both will select for incumbency. Residents (within and without) want living conditions and, if they’re economically literate, competition in both business and labour.
It’s an interesting topic that doesn’t deserve dismissal at face value.
* Corrected wording to clarify that law change only increases the number of businesses — businesses have had the franchise in City of London for centuries. h/t JumpCrisscross
If I remember correctly, the corporate vote traces precedent through guild votes.
- https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-does-one-tiny-state-set...
To achieve that requires special training, and paying someone with that training to figure that stuff out is a good idea.
If you want laws that actually function in the legal system, pay a lawyer to write them (at your direction). "Written by a lawyer" does not mean "to represent the lawyers interests" any more than "written by a developer" means "to represent the developers interests".
> CASSARA: ... overseas doing training, talking about the importance of cracking down on money laundering. And I would invariably have a student or a colleague come up to me and say, “Yeah, Mr. John, I hear you, but we’re conducting a money laundering investigation in my country, and it goes to your country, it goes to the state of Delaware. We can’t get any information about this company. Can you help us?” There was nothing I could do, and I was just embarrassed. Just embarrassed.
If these overseas people really did trace money to Delaware then they would not have a problem getting the beneficial owners because banks are required to store it under the customer due dilligence rule. If you say "well they may have given the banks misleading information" then there's no reason to think they would have given the government the correct beneficial ownership information either (courts in some circuits have held giving fake KYC data is bank fraud [punishable by up to 30 years in prison] whereas the penalty for deliberately submitting false information under the Corporate Transparency Act will be 3 years).
> WEITZMAN: ... Why would we set up a bifurcated system like that? Only because Delaware doesn’t want to add another question to its form, “Who are you?” And then ask its registering agents to verify that you are who you say you are.
> CASSARA: The bottom line is it comes down to money, okay?
Half the reason the registry was established was so that it would be *unified*. If states (plus the various territories of the US) were storing ID information all on their own special systems it would delay the implementation of the registry by decades. So they made one federal government registry. Yes, there's a trade off, but the alternative is no registry.
The audience acts like they went out of their way to get a less biased news source and edutainment
but then they skirt around everything, and all their relatable jokes are just deflections where they never gets into the nuance of whatever they just made you aware of
its like, awareness ragebait, instead of nuance. good for an overview but just the tip of the iceberg
Not sure how much work I'd be willing to go through to gain control of Seaford DE, though.
Except it’s specifically outlawed in the bill.
This also isn’t for Delaware the state, it’s for a small town in Delaware called Seaford.
And remember, each llc has to own property in Seaford to vote in city elections. So I suppose a large group of people could spend millions of dollars to sway a city council election for a town with a few thousand residents.
Also, if an individual owns many llcs, they only get one individual vote.
So the absolute maximum votes would be city residents + city parcels.
Then what about three different LLCs that each own 33% of a piece of real estate?
Then what about multiple series of a series LLC jointly owning a property? The individual series of a Delaware Series LLC do not need to be recorded in the articles of organization or registered anywhere else [0]. So you can create one series LLC and then unilaterally create an infinite number of distinct legal entities, each owning a small share of some real estate. Surely each series can't get its own whole vote.
[0] by my quick skimming of the bill the entity would have to be registered in the city's list of voters. No idea if there is a fee for an entity registering to vote, or whether the city could legally balk if you showed up with a stack of ten thousand voter registrations.
Of course if you did any of these hacks "at scale" I'd imagine the city would balk, court case, judge not finding equity in your hack, etc. The goal is pointing out perverse incentives that will inevitably crop up inadvertently, unless the bill diligently accounts for the new weird legal contours it'd create.
[0] I'm assuming that ownership being recorded would be required to register to vote, as opposed to a voter registration being allowed to say "trust me I own real estate in this city via unrecorded deed"
You may be right but I'm not seeing that in the text of the bill. It says:
(3) These provisions shall be construed in accordance with the principle of “one person/entity/one vote.” Where a voter is entitled to vote by virtue of being both a resident and an owner of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one (1) vote; where a voter is entitled to vote by ownership of two (2) or more parcels of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one (1) vote.
Elswehere it says it says that a voter can be either a natural person or an artificial entity. So if I have a thousand separate LLCs, and each one owns a separate parcel, then legally it's still "one... entity/one vote."
But even if that is disallowed because my name is on the LLCs, what's stopping me from paying 1000 out-of-state randos off the street fifty bucks each to put their names on a thousand Delaware LLCs but conferring upon me through a side contract power of attorney to vote on their behalf?
It's just kind of weird to me that we nearly had a coup d'etat a couple of years back (ostensibly) over the issue of fake votes, and here's a legislative provision codifying the right of non-residents to vote via a legal fiction. I mean Delaware, you do you, but I certainly wouldn't want this to spread to my state.
This is the part that says that even if you own multiple (2 or more) LLCs, you can still only vote once.
It says if you own "2 or more parcels of real property."
So, who owns the property in this scenario? The LLC owns the property. You personally don't own either parcel.
Each LLC owns 1 parcel of property, each LLC is a separate artificial entity, and per the bill, "every owner of property in the City...whether a natural person or artificial entity...shall have one (1) vote."
Thus, you can effectively control multiple votes by having a controlling interest in multiple LLCs.
An individual with 1,000 Lllcs will have access to 1,000 votes should they choose to use it.
I can't think of any compelling reason to do this.
What makes your "interests" more legitimate in a location if you live there for 183 days of the year, when they live there for only 182?
I personally would not be infuriated at all if my part-time neighbor voted in the local election. It would be totally fine by me.
The right being acquired by being in the locality. Homeless people can and do vote.
One can argue it is difficult to verify someone is telling the truth about residency or argue whether six months is a good choice of time period - those are valid implementation questions, but I strongly believe that in a just system, you need to be there.
Suppose a locality is bitterly divided over an issue that affects everyone, and elections centered on that topic come down to the wire. In my county, that issue is upzoning.
If you suppose that elections centered on this issue come down to the wire, it strikes me as unjust to run elections under a system where votes are up for sale, and the outcome of the election can be swung by people who have spent no time in the locality.
But your original question was whether there is any compelling reason for property owners to vote, and I gave you various examples.
It's fine that you think voting should be restricted to permanent residence, but I hope you can see that there are valid arguments on the other side as well.
I don't agree on this point. They are invested in a plot of land, not the people. A house that sits empty for most or all of the year has an extremely adverse opportunity cost to the community even if it generates capital gains for the owner. In fact the best deal a speculator can get is to acquire an empty plot of land and do nothing with it while the land appreciates from everyone else's efforts making the locality more valuable. Putting your life somewhere constitutes an investment in the community. The best deal a resident can get is to have a happy and prosperous life there. Hence why I don't find the reason compelling - the incentives are too misaligned.
I agree there are arguments, but I don't like them. Ultimately the way you determine constituency is going to affect what interest group blocs are represented at the ballot box. Absentee property owners can already vote in their place of permanent residency, so I don't think this deprives them in any way of democratic representation.
> Absentee property owners can already vote in their place of permanent residency, so I don't think this deprives them in any way of democratic representation.
It's not about one's fundamental democratic rights, it's about having a say in the issues that directly affect your second home. Things like trash pickup, utilities, and so forth, related to that second home. Not being able to vote does absolutely deprive them of a voice in that.
Introduced on: 4/20/23
Primary Sponsor: D. Short
Additional Sponsor(s): Sen. Richardson
Co-Sponsor(s):
Long Title: AN ACT TO AMEND THE CHARTER OF THE CITY OF SEAFORD RELATING TO THE CITY'S ABILITY TO AUTHORIZE ARTIFICIAL ENTITIES, LIMITED LIABILITY CORPORATIONS' PARTNERSHIPS AND TRUSTS TO VOTE IN MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS HELD IN SEAFORD.
Original Synopsis: This bill would allow the City of Seaford to authorize artificial entities, limited liability corporations' partnerships and trusts to vote in Municipal elections held in Seaford. """
Fine, you dissolve the charter. What now? What happens to the entity’s assets? Its debts? Every proposal for a “corporate death penalty” is expropriation or fining, except with extra steps. Hell, if a regular threatened you with a fine and you could pull a “corporate death” card, why wouldn’t you do it?
2. Pay the parking fee.
3. Buy a stick of gum.
The title and synopsis are hiding some important info here.
- currently 'bona fide resident' requires owning property for 6 months
- with the changes in the bill, natural persons don't need to own property to be qualified to vote, but corporations do
- and non-resident natural persons who own property in the city are also eligible
So unfortunately it is _not_ as easy as creating a bunch of shell corporations to create a big external voting block; you also have to be able to buy property for each of them.
https://legis.delaware.gov/json/BillDetail/GenerateHtmlDocum...
Depends on context. New York City, for example, ceded control to Albany after going bankrupt. The same path appears proximate for San Francisco.
In this case it looks like enabling legislation. Dover isn’t giving Seaford’s corporations a vote. It’s giving Seaford the right to give corporations a vote.
What leads you to say this? I'm a layperson so I may be missing something, but the language that the bill adds as section 7(A)(2) seems like it is saying (property-owning) corporations are qualified voters, and 7(B) doesn't seem like it gives the city some discretion to decide among qualified voters who can actually register.
Yes, states almost always dictate how local governments are organized and run. In many states, they’ll have a pre approved list of charters that cab be adopted. For example, https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleVII/Ch... has the charters that cities and towns in Massachusetts can adopt. That said, Boston doesn’t have the freedom to adopt these forms of government and instead has a charter made up of a bunch of random state statutes. https://www.cityofboston.gov/Images_Documents/2007%20the%20c...
> Why Seaford?
The sponsor of the bill is from Seaford. Presumably, he’s doing so at the request of the local government.
Also, we’ve long had the concept of having only one residence. You may own property in multiple places but you are only a resident of one. You may be a tax resident of multiple places but you are only a resident of one. Anything else IS anti-democratic as it favors the fortunate over the common person.
"I don’t vote. Fuck ’em. FUCK THEM. I don't vote. Two reasons. Two reasons I don’t vote: first of all, it’s meaningless. This country was bought and sold and paid for a long time ago. The shit they shuffle around every four years doesn’t mean a fuckin’ thing. And secondly, I don't vote 'cause I believe if you vote, you have no right to complain. People like to twist that around. I know, they say, they say: "well if you don't vote you have no right to complain". But where's the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent people, and they get into office and screw everything up, well you are responsible for what they have done, YOU caused the problem, you voted them in, you have no right to complain. I on the other hand, who did not vote, WHO DID NOT VOTE. Who in fact did not even leave the house on election-day, am in no way responsible for what these people have done, and have every RIGHT to complain as loud as I want, about the mess YOU created, that I had nothing to do with." - George Carlin
https://www.capegazette.com/affiliate-post/remembering-nylon...
Ahh... They (1) want to put the lobbyist out of business, or (2) all the "good" lobbyists are working in DC so Delaware is getting creative :)
Do matter why, this is still another nail in the coffin of democracy.
Voting is also the least effective method to influence and lobby in local politics; corporations and wealthy outsiders of course long held the upper hand in this space.
For context, Seaford, the city to which this would apply, is in a section of the state pejoratively known as "Slower Lower" Delaware. It's largely rural and largely conservative -- at least compared with the top part of the state and the beach areas.
The bill's sponsors are both Republicans, who hold minorities in both the state House and the state Senate. As you can see in this map of 2020 presidential election results, although the state is heavily blue, Seaford is in the only county where Trump got a majority of votes: https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/delaware/
My take is that this is a political statement more than a legitimate legislative attempt.
If not, wtf can a corporation vote?
wait what? pieces of paper get a vote now?