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Notes -
A Delaware judge has ruled that corporations have a right to vote. I have not yet had time to read the decision yet, but this seems to upend a lot of norms around voting in the US.
My immediate question is what... what the hell? This seems like a fairly bold decision on the part of the judge, and one that normally would not be issued by a state Superior court judge. Is there some kind of inside baseball that I'm missing here? I know that Delaware is very friendly to corporate interests, but this seems like an escalation. Is this a decision that's meant to be overturned?
I'm not sure I would characterize the decision that way. Rather, I would say this:
In other words, the judge is not saying that corporations must be permitted to vote. Rather, he's saying that if the legislature decides to give corporations a vote, it's not necessarily a constitutional problem.
The article you link to doesn't give much context, but I think I can make some guesses. First, the elections at issue were in a small municipality on a barrier island. So I'm guessing that most of the property is owned by non-residents. Apparently the law at issue gave all property owners the right to vote in the election, as opposed to having the vote limited to year-round residents. This seems totally reasonable to me; the alternative is to have a small number of year-round residents set policy for the entire town, a sort of taxation without representation situation. Since some of the property is owned through trusts, corporations, etc., it's reasonable to let those entities vote in the election.
The City of London (the one-square-mile financial district which has its own sui generis local government which has maintained institutional continuity since time immemorial) has the same issue - most of the property is owned by businesses and the employed population vastly exceeds the resident population. The franchise since the 19th century (which survived the abolition of votes for nonresident property owners in the rest of the country in 1969) was voting-age natural persons owning or leasing property in the City, which didn't cause problems when most of the businesses in the City were partnerships - the partners qualified to vote. But the transition from traditional partnerships to either corporate ownership (the banks) or LLCs and such-like (the law and accountancy firms) meant that the business property franchise had ceased to represent the real business City, so they changed the rules in 2002 to say that property-owning businesses (regardless of corporate form) should designate electors who work in the city to vote on their behalf.
There is a joke that the City of London is the only place where introducing multiple votes for corporations could be a positive democratic reform.
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