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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10687 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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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.

Corporations, partnerships, trusts, limited liability companies, and other “artificial entities” have the right to vote in Delaware elections under some circumstances, a judge said in a novel ruling Tuesday.

Judge Craig A. Karsnitz rejected an ACLU challenge to a charter permitting voting in local elections by the entities that own most of the property in the Town of Fenwick Island, one of several municipalities in the state with similar provisions. Karsnitz dismissed the lawsuit from Delaware’s Superior Court, citing “the principle of one person/entity/one vote.”

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?

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?"

I'm finally sitting down over lunch to read the decision. What would stop a company from forming 10,000 subsidiaries that jointly owned a single piece of property in common?

Nothing obvious. But what would stop a natural person from splitting a property between 10,000 natural people in the same manner?

It wouldn't be practicable. The more people who own a piece of property, the harder it gets to make decisions about the property, and get the owners to contribute money for upkeep. A dispute would inevitably develop, and the result would be that one of the owners files a partition action and the whole property is sold.

I'm imagining a situation where one person owns an outright majority of the property and each of the other 9999 owns only a minuscule proportion, so that the majority owner has more than enough wealth on his own to conduct maintenance unilaterally and to thwart a partition action by buying out the objector.

And what's the motivation for the majority owner to do this? He'd be giving equal access to the property to 9999 other people while being prepared to do unilateral maintenance, and if they don't contribute he's going to pay a 5-figure sum to conduct a partition action where he might not even be the high bidder. So he can...give his friends votes for the Fenwick Island town council? If I'm one of the 9999 I'm there to get access to the property and I could probably care less about some local election.

a partition action where he might not even be the high bidder

I was assuming that such a partition would work like the procedure laid out in the Uniform Partition of Heirs' Property Act, in which the judge orders an appraisal and the majority owner can buy out the objector at that price without any bidding. But obviously I am misunderstanding how partitions work.

Partitions are generally governed by the common law of property. The act you cite is a relatively recent reform that has only been adopted in about half the states and only applies in specific situations. One unfortunately common issue, particularly among lower income populations, is when a property owner dies and no estate is opened, and the property they own simply continues to be occupied by whatever family members happen to occupy it. After a few generations, some long lost relative finds out they own an interest and files a partition suit, whereby the property is sold at a cash auction for less than market value, often to an investor, with the result often being that someone who has been living in the house a long time finds themselves dispossessed. The model act is intended to keep the property in the family by allowing an heir to purchase at market value in a normal transaction, which has the side effect of preserving the full value of the property.

From what I cal tell three states have applied this process to all partition actions, but Delaware never enacted the model legislation to begin with. And from what I can tell, it's unlikely that any additional states will, because there's some controversy over how effective the legislation is. One unintended side effect is that all of the additional safeguards have added expense to the process, which was already expensive to begin with.

Generally speaking, you need to be careful when relying on model uniform legislation. Some things, like the Uniform Commercial Code, have been adopted nearly universally and can be cited chapter and verse without too much concern of running afoul of some local variation. Others, like the Uniform Probate Code, have only been adopted by a minority of states, with reforms being incorporated piecemeal in others. And then there are cases like the Model Penal Code, which is considered successful model legislation since the spirit of the reforms have been adopted, but the actual legislation varies widely among jurisdictions, with no state that I'm aware of adopting the actual statutory language.

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