Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
14hr ago
It helps to read the decision. Relevant background:
In 2008, the Delaware General Assembly amended the Charter of the Town of Fenwick Island ("Fenwick"), a small coastal community, to allow Fenwick to expand it's voter registration rolls to allow individuals to cast votes on behalf of trusts, limited liability companies, partnerships, and corporations that own property in Fenwick. Today, the overwhelming majority of legal entity property owners in Fenwick registered to vote, and on whose behalf votes are cast, are trusts.
In this action the American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware, a corporation ("Plaintiff"), challenges these provisions, asserting that Fenwick's Charter violates the Elections Clause of the Delaware Constitution by way of "vote dilution;" i.e., the dilution of votes of human beings by votes of artificial legal entities.
The judge did not find some generalized right to vote for corporate entities. Rather:
1. In 2008 the Delaware legislature amended a town's charter to permit voting by certain corporate entities that owned property in that town.
2. The ACLU sued claiming the Delaware constitution only permitted natural persons to vote.
According to the judge's analysis:
1. The Delaware Constitution's Election Clause consists, in its entirety of "All elections shall be free and equal."
2. Who is eligible to vote in a municipal election is generally governed by a municipality's charter (under Delaware state law).
3. Permitting non-natural-person voters does not violated the text of the Election Clause in the Delaware Constitution.
Apparently, there are other municipalities in Delaware that have similar arrangements. The judge mentions the City of Wilmington explicitly. The judge only briefly mentions the corporate personhood thing since it's not essential to their analysis, but the ACLU argument relies heavily on it.
The question is less "do corporations have the right to vote?" and more "does the Delaware constitution forbid the Delaware legislature from giving corporations the power to vote in municipal elections?"
My impression is the 10,000 subsidiaries would get one joint-vote. The charter has provisions for the case where a single voter is entitled to vote as both a resident and property owner (still only one vote) and where a voter owns multiple pieces of property (still only one vote). It is a little unclear to me what the legal arrangement looks like where a piece of real property has multiple owners but I suspect they would still only get one vote.
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