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.
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.
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.
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"
An individual with 1,000 Lllcs will have access to 1,000 votes should they choose to use it.
Not sure how much work I'd be willing to go through to gain control of Seaford DE, though.