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Notes -
It helps to read the decision. Relevant background:
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?
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.
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.
I tend to disagree with this. Even before the 'Rona, it was significantly cheaper and easier to rent commercial real estate in Manhattan compared to residential real estate. Logically, it seems likely that a big part of the reason for this discrepancy is that commercial tenants have far fewer rights than residential tenants.
I do agree that from the perspective of overall housing cost, relaxed zoning would tend to help.
Even before WFH commercial real estate, particularly office real estate, has the ‘pressure valve’ of a move to the suburbs. Sure, Goldman Sachs isn’t going to relocate its trading floor and Vogue isn’t going to relocate its editorial team to Long Island or Jersey City, but the marginal finance or law firm back office, mid level accounting firm, healthcare provider, insurance company, tech firm, state or municipal (or federal) government office, or medium to large sized corporate headquarters can move out to either Jersey or LI city, or to one of the countless super cheap strip mall offices all around the further reaches of the outer boroughs and the more distant suburbs that are still within commuting and driving distance. This limits price increases for office space in Manhattan to some extent. Many employees may even already live nearer these places and so support this kind of move.
By contrast the residential real estate dynamics are different because of zoning. A lot of housing around cheap suburban office parks on Long Island is super expensive because it’s single family zoned for wealthy PMC in the burbs of one of the richest cities in the world. There’s also far greater sentimentality attached to residential real estate by residents obviously.
The same is true, and perhaps more so, with residential real estate. Lots of people live in New Jersey; Long Island; Westchester; and even Connecticut -- and work in Manhattan. In fact, it's often easier for a worker to move to the suburbs than it is for a business because mass transit is typically oriented around moving people in and out of the central business districts.
By the way, I once leased space in Manhattan for a business. There was no credit check; no application form; no application fee; no references required. That's almost unheard of for residential real estate. The difference is that as a commercial tenant, if I don't pay rent or otherwise cause problems, it's much easier to get rid of me.
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