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The law which says "Don't be a wise-ass." Or, more formally, the legal principle which says that laws should be construed so as to do justice.
Which law would that be?
There is a reason that the US constitution is about 4500 words instead of just
All elections shall be free and equal.
Laws should be construed so as to do justice.
The point of having fine-grained, specific laws is that "the judge already knows what outcome is just, and will just reach for some law to justify it" is a terrible procedure. It gets you decisions like Roe v Wade, where reproductive freedom hangs on a very shaky legal decision until some later SCOTUS takes the common sense approach that the amendments did not mention abortion at all.
Nobody sane would campaign for the biggest employer in some town also getting a single vote, because that would not change anything -- they clearly have a vested interest in the local politics, and can trivially spend money on donations or campaigns on a scale which will give them a lot more influence than a single vote ever could.
"One man, one vote" is a very simple Schelling point. There is always some quibbling over details, and we end up at something like "one adult, non-felon citizen of any gender whose primary residency is registered in the municipality at the reference date", with the voting rights of alien permanent residents being up for debate.
It is also somewhat robust, because people are very expensive. Sure, a company could just pay politically sympathetic people to settle in their town, but they might spend northwards of 100k$ per vote that way, so it is much cheaper to just pay bribes to the voters already there.
By contrast, corporate entities are very cheap to create and maintain -- Delaware LLCs pay 300$ in taxes a year. So @birb_cromble's question is exactly the right one: how does this scale?
Even if there is a limit to one corporate vote per property lot, that would still leave a lot of loopholes. A family living in their own house might decide to form a holding company which leases their home back to them for a dollar a year, then cast that company's vote. Landlords would wield a lot of votes. (Seriously, who looks at the present system and says "the problem with that is that landlords have too little political power"?)
There is a reason that the US is not organized as a stock company, where everyone starts out with one share and the federal government can simply emit more stocks to raise funds, and voting power is simply the amount of shares you own. This would lead to the effective disenfranchisement of the majority. At least in a democracy, the 1% will have to spend money on campaigns to get the 99% to vote for them, and different 1%ers might be competing with different political visions rather than just their budgets.
That would be me. Renters protections are excessive. Rent control is destructive and sadly becoming more common.
Washington state assigns publicly-funded counsel to low-income people who are being evicted. I can't imagine trying to be a landlord there.
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In general I agree. A lot of nice real estate (which could be rented out) sits empty because the owners don't want to take the chance of getting royally screwed by an eviction moratorium; rent control laws; etc. Even if they do rent out apartments, landlords need to charge everyone a hefty premium as a result of these serious risks.
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Landlord freedom combined with a liberalization of zoning / planning rules would solve the housing cost situation. The former without the latter wouldn’t do much. To harness greed you need to allow people to do business, which in residential construction means making it cheap and fast to build. Capitalism can take care of the rest.
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If you were hoping that I would provide a cite to the Delaware Code, then I'm sorry for disappointing you. The "Don't be a wise-ass" rule is typically not codified.
To a large extent, I agree with you. But at the same time, it's impossible to foresee every last situation, especially if there are a lot of rules lawyers trying to find clever loopholes in order to twist things in ways that are plainly abusive. Judges need to be given some degree of discretion, although yes, if judges are given discretion it can be expected that there will be a problem with judges abusing their discretion.
In any event, you seem to be making a normative argument here, i.e. you are making an argument about how the law should be structured and applied. By contrast, I was making a descriptive argument. I was talking about what would happen in practice if someone got cute and tried to take over the town by buying a piece of property and setting up 10,000 corporations to co-own the property.
I agree, but sometimes there is tension between what is simple and what is fair. This town in Delaware is a seaside town; I gather that there is a very small number of full time residents and a large number of property owners who, although they pay taxes, are only seasonal residents. "One man one vote" would lead to a very significant taxation without representation kind of situation. It reminds me of an article I read about the City of Industry in California. Apparently, it was set up so that there would be a very small number of actual residents combined with large amounts of commercial non-residential property. The actual residents are able to give themselves extremely cushy jobs in local government.
I can't speak for others, but I certainly do. Maybe it's because I live in the Northeastern United States and I see the way the laws are often stacked in favor of tenants. To the point where a lot of people are disincentivized to invest in and add to the residential rental real estate market. To the point where incumbent tenants have so many rights that it becomes hard for newcomers to rent a decent place at an affordable price.
The rule could be that an incorporated entity gets a vote if and only if it is the sole owner of a parcel of land.
I think the bigger deterrent is that there's simply no reason for anyone to participate in such a scheme. I neither live in Fenwick Island nor own property there, and as a consequence, I do not care about who sits in local government offices. I doubt you care either. Someone may theoretically be able to hatch a scheme where they subdivide their property a thousand ways and give votes to 999 people who otherwise wouldn't be able to vote, and structure the transactions so that these minority owners wouldn't have any rights to the property that would prejudice the controlling owner, but I don't know how I could be induced to participate. Rental income split that many ways isn't much of an inducement. If a property rents for $10,000/week on average, which is generous considering that in the off season there are likely going to be several weeks where it doesn't rent at all, and half of that income goes to the rental company and to pay taxes and maintenance costs, a 1/1000 owner is getting about $5/week. If it's not being rented, try coordinating use with 1,000 other people. In exchange for that $5/week and the right to vote in local elections, you're taking on liability.
Of course, you're not actually going to get that $5/week, because no rental company is going to agree to leasing a property with a thousand owners, and no insurance company is going to underwrite such a property. Even if it's vacant property, and the controlling owner agrees to pay the property taxes, what do you do if he doesn't pay? The taxing authority doesn't give a shit about your agreement, so you'd better be prepared to pay the taxes yourself and sue him for reimbursement. What do you do if someone injures themself on your uninsurable property and sues you?
Getting to your concerns, though, even if somebody did that and somehow found thousands of participants, why would someone structure a transaction for the sole purpose of giving votes to out-of-towners? It would certainly look like the controlling owner was giving these shares away under the presumption that the minority owners would vote for his preferred candidate, at which point one wonders if any other inducements were used to encourage participation, which makes it look less like a real estate deal and more like a sophisticated form of electoral fraud, in which case having the registrations invalidated would be the least of their concerns. One expects that even if the registrations are allowed to stand, such a scheme would only invite an investigation from the attorney general before the first vote is even cast. I am not willing to subject myself to such an investigation and possible prosecution for the privilege of being able to vote for Fenwick Island town council or whatever, and I doubt most other people would be willing to either.
I myself don't particularly, but I can definitely think of situations where people absolutely would engage in (and participate in) such a scheme if they could get away with it. For example, in a situation like that of the East Ramapo Central School District. And yes, if a respected ultra-Orthodox Rabbi instructed his congregants accept the role of partial owner of a piece of property and vote for a particular slate, it would happen.
Anyway, as I alluded to above, I don't think it very much matters whether a person gets cute by means of setting up a thousand corporations or by recruiting a thousand ultra-Orthodox Jews. Either way, the "don't be a wise-ass" rule would get applied. And it seems like you more or less agree.
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