Can we get the title updated? This is specifically votes in the city of Seaford. We aren't going to see state or federal elections flooded with corporate votes.
It's one town of 8,000 people trying to allow non-residents who own property through LLCs still vote.
It might be bad, but the title feels misleading to me.
The title of the bill is AN ACT TO AMEND THE CHARTER OF THE CITY OF SEAFORD RELATING TO THE CITY'S ABILITY TO AUTHORIZE ARTIFICIAL ENTITIES, LIMITED LIABILITY CORPORATIONS' PARTNERSHIPS AND TRUSTS TO VOTE IN MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS HELD IN SEAFORD. What's wrong with specificity?
Journalism is the act of journaling something, recording things that happen or happened as accurately and detailed as possible. When it comes to journalism I do not tolerate any sensationalizing, let alone outright faking.
People who "wake up" to sensational, clickbait, fake news "journalism" eventually learn to tune out, because most of us are too fucking god damn busy to be bothered with that literal bullshit.
This is actually routinely happening in Delaware, several other cities including Newark have enacted this law.
From another comment [1]:
> In Newark, Delaware’s third-biggest city, a similar rule allowed one property manager to vote 31 times in a local referendum in 2018, one for each of the LLCs their company owned
"Vote early, vote often" isn't supposed to be a recommended best practice. What prevents me from opening up 10000 LLCs and solely deciding the outcome of an off cycle election?
It really boggles the mind how ignorant Americans are of basic civics. Just the other day I saw a generally knowledgeable law YouTuber state that rights are "granted by the government" which can't be further from the truth in the US.
> rights are "granted by the government" which can't be further from the truth in the US.
Yeah, this is a disconcerting trend that I've observed too. Do you this think could be an issue that's always existed at the same levels and is now easier to observe due to the window of social media (and looks like a trend), or do you think it's something new?
It’s a non-obvious concept. If you don’t have some knowledge of the history of law, civics and republics, it’s easy to think of the Bill of Rights as granting rights.
Even with some knowledge of those things, it's hard to rationalize inherent rights with what we do to noncitizens. Everybody has these rights, but for some reason the Bill of Rights only protects the rights of Americans. Pretty easy to mistake that as the Bill of Rights granting rights.
>That literature has been interpreted by the courts as the Constitution only applying to United States citizens
"For some reason" seems like a fair description of that. It's not explicitly said, the closest is "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."
And "We the people" is talking about who wrote it, I don't get how one can claim that bit is who it applies to.
I get the arguments made to do this, to me they seem clearly against the spirit of the Bill of Rights/Founding Fathers, something we generally hold to be sacrosanct.
One possible theory is that in the race to standardize and push farther on standardized testing subjects, non core curriculums are getting cut because they are not tested for and the US has not expanded the school day or year significantly.
> the US has not expanded the school day or year significantly.
No, but while some students can benefit from the internet in general for school, I'm convinced keeping a socially-expected Skinner box on one's person every waking hour is not great in general. More specifically, learning complex, multi-faceted, and important topics while (attempting to) ignore the Skinner box is not good for any subject that is not, or cannot be, subjected to standardized testing - and many subjects that are.
The only way I can see this making sense to anybody who is paying attention is if its presented as a tool to help their political side, which is obviously correct, against the opposing side, which is obviously the devil. Surely if _they_ had access to something like this they would use it to their benefit, the bastards. You'd have to be a saint not to use it against them! Acting fair is very hard when you keep being told your opponents aren't. No, you'd rather have an unfair system that is only unfair against your enemies...
This is very Cyberpunk, I can't wait for a Delaware city to allow LLCs to run for seats on the council or to become the mayor (several-dozen votes per controlling entity may help!)
In my imagination, the first thing Mayor Blackrock 9754 LLC will do is approve a referendum to phase out residential zoning for new developments, next comes the requisite Japanese tech corps, holographic ads and perpetual night. I never imagined this would be set in Delaware - but it sort of tracks.
I've been wondering about this for a while. Since we know corporations are people my friend and have all the rights or a person what should stop them from voting. I assume that if pressed a corporation that is 18 years old should be allowed to vote, there's nothing in the constitution prohibiting it. Knowing the current group of yokels in the SC I'm sure we'd see a 6-3 vote codifying the voting rights of a corporation.
Could they be drafted? It would be very efficient way to increase number of combatants if you could just draft a company and send the board+employees to war front...
Corporations are legal persons, but they aren’t natural persons but instead vehicles for actions by natural persons. Granting them voting rights effectively is just granting additional voting rights for the people that control them in proportion of their control, making them effectively a form of selective electoral inequality (and, insofar as as there are government-imposed costs on having a corporation, a form of poll taxes.)
However, the idea of a construct being deemed a person makes no sense given how we define what a person is.
Further, having essentially broken that definition, we have opened the door for all sorts of crazy legal things to happen! Anything can be a person. Anything can be anything, taken to extremes.
In addition to voting issues you mention, having the corporation as person means some of us have agency others do not due to how we operate companies. The owners have a shield for all sorts of otherwise expensive and risky behavior. Great as well as evil actions are possible, affordable and it is not necessary we allow these things.
I mean isn't that what we have with a self-driving car? Who do you sue when that car plows into a group of nuns that the algorithm mistook as a black hole? Who's the driver, the passenger sitting in the left front seat or the company with shitty code?
Politically? Sure, but it’s not like the idea has never existed before. You can try anything politically, independent of whether it’s a good idea, bad idea, viable or unviable.
The constitution leaves qualifications for voting up to the states. If Delaware allows corporations to in certain state elections, it would follow that they’d be able to vote for congressional seats as well.
From article 1:
>The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.
Specifically, the 14th amendment's equal protection clause is seen to apply to voting rights (of which apportionment is perhaps the most unclear, but literally giving individuals multiple votes, as opposed to different weights is sort of a beyond obvious violation).
Let’s say you live in Baltimore but also own a house in a small resort town. In Delaware, that town can decide to let you vote in Baltimore and at your vacation home.
Legally they do this by saying city elections are open to both residents and property owners (regardless of where they live).
That all seems pretty reasonable for small resort towns. But a lot of property is owned by trusts, llcs, and corporations. So this would include those property owners as well.
> I can imagine locals who live there full time having problems getting city see that a guy who lives there 3 weeks a year doesn’t care about
There is a balance of interests. That doesn’t mean anyone not somewhere all the time should get zero representation. This is part of finding that balance.
Just as a practical example, in my area, we've got all kinds of property owned by people who live halfway across the country. I've got a particular individual in mind who lives in New York and has never resided in this state. He owns about a 1/4 mile stretch of strip mall in my parent's city. The buildings are getting rough and the roads and parking lots look like a war zone. If a similar law was enacted here, he'd get to vote in local elections in spite of the fact that his only ties to the area are in real estate holdings. He has no interest in that city being a decent place to live and I can't imagine he'd hesitate to support legislation that would increase his short-term profits at the expense of the city's residents.
As a democratic principle, "one person one vote" only applies to a single area. It means you don't get to cast two votes in the same election.
But if you have multiple citizenship you can vote in multiple countries, for instance.
And in this case being able to vote in two municipalities at the municipal level only isn't a violation of one person, one vote.
On the other hand, if they allowed a single owner of multiple LLC's to vote once for each LLC, that certainly becomes questionable. But another HN comment here indicates the text of the bill specifically disallows that.
I really must note this ideal is already not practiced in the United States, in fact it never was. The Electoral College, the Senate, the Supreme Court ensures this.
After Citizens United I wouldn't be surprised at all if eventually corporate federal vote happened.
There is a ton of Supreme Court case law that disagrees with you.[0]
>in fact it never was. The Electoral College, the Senate, the Supreme Court ensures this.
Note my use of the word modern. All of those (elected) institutions are ossified in place due to the herculean effort it would take to modify them. They are products of a time when that was very much not a settled value in the United States.
Note that as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, such rules allow people who own multiple LLCs to vote multiple times in the same election, in the same jurisdiction.
> There is a ton of Supreme Court case law that disagrees with you.[0]
And how much it helped roe v wade not being overturned? Case law is fine and dandy until there is political will to overturn it. Then it only matters what political opinion have majority there. And it always was some flavour of right(D or R).
Row v wade had largely been eroded by the time it was overturned. It was obviously a very big deal politically, but the operative case law was Casey v planned parenthood, which allowed for a significant amount of restrictions. Casey paved the way for the mass whittling away of abortion rights in many states before roe was officially overturned.
The roe precedent was not on nearly as firm of ground.
Though your overall point is still obviously correct, at the end of the day the court is a political institution ruled over by 9 unelected individuals.
It’s still Democratic, it just isn’t equally representative.
I am against the EC as well, but it isn’t representative of modern notions of democracy in America. As I said, it exists as little more than an anachronism.
Thank you for steelmanning this. Most of the other comments resolve to textual downvotes. I don't necessarily blame people for this but it makes for useless discussion.
I don't think that the massive and countless # "artificial" entities that incorporate in Delaware for the purpose of legal arbitrage should have a say in how the actual people that actually live in the state go about living the lives on a daily basis. Even following Delaware history, it does in fact seem crazy to me.
Delaware resident here. It's been happening for years:
> In Newark, Delaware’s third-biggest city, a similar rule allowed one property manager to vote 31 times in a local referendum in 2018, one for each of the LLCs their company owned
Delaware's not really a tax haven. They're in the lower half of states wrt corporate tax burden last time I checked, but that's not the main benefit.
IANAL, but the main thing they I've heard they provide corporations is legal stability via their court system. Since just about every major corporation is registered in Delaware, they have precedent for just about every goofy b2b contract dispute. This allows for two very nice effects: 1) predictability about how cases will go if they hit the courts; 2) the court system tends to work very quickly when there is a dispute.
A good recent example of this was Elon Musk's dispute around purchasing twitter. Musk very obviously didn't want the deal to go through, twitter filed suit in mid july, and just three months they were a day before trial and Musk decided to buy the company as twitter was demanding. Musk ostensibly had every reason to delay as long as possible, with essentially unbounded amounts of resources to do so, and all with what sounds like a pretty goofy contract. A great example of a complex-ish b2b contract problem working it's way very quickly through the system (ie. going to trial within three months), and leaving both sides sure enough at that point of the final outcome to solve their problem without actually going to trial.
Specifically they have an entire court system for corporate disputes which - along with the general clarity of Delaware corporate law - is what provides the expertise and capacity to produce sensible and speedy resolutions (relatively speaking lol).
The City of London does this. For purely municipal matters, in places with a large commuter population, this can make sense—it gives voice to the people who work alongside those who live there. (Given present politics, a vote for workers might play better.)
To elaborate a bit, "City of London" is not the city of London as one would normally imagine. It is a district only about a square mile large that contains the central business and financial district. It has very little residential zoning and fewer than 10,000 residents (compared to 10 million in greater London). A recent change in law *increased the number of businesses receiving voting power to 32,000, and they nominate a number of voters that scales with their number of employees (and the total far outweighs residential votes).
* Corrected wording to clarify that law change only increases the number of businesses — businesses have had the franchise in City of London for centuries. h/t JumpCrisscross
> a big difference between giving a voice to "the people who work [there] " versus to the people who own businesses there
There is, and in it a tradeoff. The businesses will prioritise growth over liveability and working conditions. Workers working conditions; both will select for incumbency. Residents (within and without) want living conditions and, if they’re economically literate, competition in both business and labour.
It’s an interesting topic that doesn’t deserve dismissal at face value.
Do the workers get a vote, or just the corporation?
I think every person should have a say in the laws where they live, and that includes where they work. Sadly most people get one vote based on one address
In Melbourne, Australia, the local government that covers the downtown area and a few surrounding suburbs gives 2 votes to businesses and 1 vote to residents. Guess what kind of policy exists? Highly pro business, growing inequality for residents.
Freakonomics did an excellent podcast investigation on the corruption and efficiency of the Delaware legal code regarding corporations, bankruptcy, tax evasion and money laundering. According to the people they interviewed, almost all laws regarding any business practices are written not by lawmakers but by lawyers. Honestly, I couldn't figure out whether that was good or bad, but it seemed dishonest because lawyers aren't responsible to adhere to the values of the constituents of the state.
To me, that’s like complaining that software requirements are written by software people instead of user representatives; sure, you can do it the other way around, but it largely leads to poorly written requirements.
... but at least those poorly written requirements benefit the user. I would rather less than perfect rules written to benefit me, the citizen, than calculated rules written to benefit corporations that have enough money to play this shell game.
Poorly written requirements benefit someone, but there's not really any reason to think it would benefit you specifically. They may just as well benefit someone who seeks to harm you, or at minimum doesn't care what happens to you.
If the user wants software that actually meets their needs, they want the requirements to be reasonably unambiguous, to have interactions with other tech thought through, etc.
To achieve that requires special training, and paying someone with that training to figure that stuff out is a good idea.
If you want laws that actually function in the legal system, pay a lawyer to write them (at your direction). "Written by a lawyer" does not mean "to represent the lawyers interests" any more than "written by a developer" means "to represent the developers interests".
Pretty much all laws of any complexity are written by lawyers. The lawyers are engaged by the lawmakers to write the laws, so that they are written properly and actually work. Just like government software is written by software developers and government buildings are built by construction workers.
It also is just a misleading set of complaints by a bunch of activists.
> CASSARA: ... overseas doing training, talking about the importance of cracking down on money laundering. And I would invariably have a student or a colleague come up to me and say, “Yeah, Mr. John, I hear you, but we’re conducting a money laundering investigation in my country, and it goes to your country, it goes to the state of Delaware. We can’t get any information about this company. Can you help us?” There was nothing I could do, and I was just embarrassed. Just embarrassed.
If these overseas people really did trace money to Delaware then they would not have a problem getting the beneficial owners because banks are required to store it under the customer due dilligence rule. If you say "well they may have given the banks misleading information" then there's no reason to think they would have given the government the correct beneficial ownership information either (courts in some circuits have held giving fake KYC data is bank fraud [punishable by up to 30 years in prison] whereas the penalty for deliberately submitting false information under the Corporate Transparency Act will be 3 years).
> WEITZMAN: ... Why would we set up a bifurcated system like that? Only because Delaware doesn’t want to add another question to its form, “Who are you?” And then ask its registering agents to verify that you are who you say you are.
> CASSARA: The bottom line is it comes down to money, okay?
Half the reason the registry was established was so that it would be *unified*. If states (plus the various territories of the US) were storing ID information all on their own special systems it would delay the implementation of the registry by decades. So they made one federal government registry. Yes, there's a trade off, but the alternative is no registry.
This is what bothers and annoys me about Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and even The Daily Show
The audience acts like they went out of their way to get a less biased news source and edutainment
but then they skirt around everything, and all their relatable jokes are just deflections where they never gets into the nuance of whatever they just made you aware of
its like, awareness ragebait, instead of nuance. good for an overview but just the tip of the iceberg
Stuff the ballot box! Seems like it would be relatively cheap for a corporation(s) to register countless entities "including but not limited to corporations, partnerships, trusts, and limited liability companies", which already register there for legal arbitrage, and then really create their own set of rules.
It seems like the bill requires your LLC/Corporation own property in the city, not just be any registered corporation operating in the area. Seems like a way to enable vacationers/landlords vote in local elections.
Because if you own a summer house you have a legitimate interest in how the town administers utilities and garbage collection, zoning that affects your property values, police spending, etc.
I don't think that's a compelling reason. I would be infuriated as a full-time resident to see a legion of absentee landlords and fair-weather vacationers suppress representation of my arguably significantly more legitimate interests. Those people would have literally purchased, with cash, a right to vote in democratic elections in my locality, free of any obligation to maintain a presence there. Something I as a renter do not have.
If you live there as a renter as a primary residence you get to vote too -- I don't know what your last sentence is talking about. Similarly "purchased with cash" with your rent money.
What makes your "interests" more legitimate in a location if you live there for 183 days of the year, when they live there for only 182?
I personally would not be infuriated at all if my part-time neighbor voted in the local election. It would be totally fine by me.
> Similarly "purchased with cash" with your rent money.
The right being acquired by being in the locality. Homeless people can and do vote.
One can argue it is difficult to verify someone is telling the truth about residency or argue whether six months is a good choice of time period - those are valid implementation questions, but I strongly believe that in a just system, you need to be there.
Suppose a locality is bitterly divided over an issue that affects everyone, and elections centered on that topic come down to the wire. In my county, that issue is upzoning.
If you suppose that elections centered on this issue come down to the wire, it strikes me as unjust to run elections under a system where votes are up for sale, and the outcome of the election can be swung by people who have spent no time in the locality.
Votes aren't "up for sale". You can't buy a vote. You have to buy property, which there is a very limited amount of, and it isn't cheap. And you still only ever get one vote max. And any issue that's "down to the wire" might be decided by any voter. And property owners are people who are quite literally invested in the community, even more so than full-time renters.
But your original question was whether there is any compelling reason for property owners to vote, and I gave you various examples.
It's fine that you think voting should be restricted to permanent residence, but I hope you can see that there are valid arguments on the other side as well.
> And property owners are people who are quite literally invested in the community, even more so than full-time renters.
I don't agree on this point. They are invested in a plot of land, not the people. A house that sits empty for most or all of the year has an extremely adverse opportunity cost to the community even if it generates capital gains for the owner. In fact the best deal a speculator can get is to acquire an empty plot of land and do nothing with it while the land appreciates from everyone else's efforts making the locality more valuable. Putting your life somewhere constitutes an investment in the community. The best deal a resident can get is to have a happy and prosperous life there. Hence why I don't find the reason compelling - the incentives are too misaligned.
I agree there are arguments, but I don't like them. Ultimately the way you determine constituency is going to affect what interest group blocs are represented at the ballot box. Absentee property owners can already vote in their place of permanent residency, so I don't think this deprives them in any way of democratic representation.
Nobody's talking about speculators. And owners aren't usually invested in merely a plot of land, they're invested in a home. That they may live in part of the year and rent out part of the year, quite often. That's being involved with the community.
> Absentee property owners can already vote in their place of permanent residency, so I don't think this deprives them in any way of democratic representation.
It's not about one's fundamental democratic rights, it's about having a say in the issues that directly affect your second home. Things like trash pickup, utilities, and so forth, related to that second home. Not being able to vote does absolutely deprive them of a voice in that.
This also isn’t for Delaware the state, it’s for a small town in Delaware called Seaford.
And remember, each llc has to own property in Seaford to vote in city elections. So I suppose a large group of people could spend millions of dollars to sway a city council election for a town with a few thousand residents.
> Also, if an individual owns many llcs, they only get one individual vote.
You may be right but I'm not seeing that in the text of the bill. It says:
(3) These provisions shall be construed in accordance with the principle of “one person/entity/one vote.” Where a voter is entitled to vote by virtue of being both a resident and an owner of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one (1) vote; where a voter is entitled to vote by ownership of two (2) or more parcels of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one (1) vote.
Elswehere it says it says that a voter can be either a natural person or an artificial entity. So if I have a thousand separate LLCs, and each one owns a separate parcel, then legally it's still "one... entity/one vote."
But even if that is disallowed because my name is on the LLCs, what's stopping me from paying 1000 out-of-state randos off the street fifty bucks each to put their names on a thousand Delaware LLCs but conferring upon me through a side contract power of attorney to vote on their behalf?
It's just kind of weird to me that we nearly had a coup d'etat a couple of years back (ostensibly) over the issue of fake votes, and here's a legislative provision codifying the right of non-residents to vote via a legal fiction. I mean Delaware, you do you, but I certainly wouldn't want this to spread to my state.
The bill doesn't say even if you own "2 or more LLCs."
It says if you own "2 or more parcels of real property."
So, who owns the property in this scenario? The LLC owns the property. You personally don't own either parcel.
Each LLC owns 1 parcel of property, each LLC is a separate artificial entity, and per the bill, "every owner of property in the City...whether a natural person or artificial entity...shall have one (1) vote."
Thus, you can effectively control multiple votes by having a controlling interest in multiple LLCs.
What does the bill say about jointly owned real estate? Like two people owning one vacation house? Do they each get one vote?
Then what about three different LLCs that each own 33% of a piece of real estate?
Then what about multiple series of a series LLC jointly owning a property? The individual series of a Delaware Series LLC do not need to be recorded in the articles of organization or registered anywhere else [0]. So you can create one series LLC and then unilaterally create an infinite number of distinct legal entities, each owning a small share of some real estate. Surely each series can't get its own whole vote.
[0] by my quick skimming of the bill the entity would have to be registered in the city's list of voters. No idea if there is a fee for an entity registering to vote, or whether the city could legally balk if you showed up with a stack of ten thousand voter registrations.
Another option would be subdividing a piece of real estate. Zoning approvals are generally needed to create buildable lots. But depending on what the registry of deeds will let you record [0], you could divide the area into tiny individual parcels, each singularly owned.
Of course if you did any of these hacks "at scale" I'd imagine the city would balk, court case, judge not finding equity in your hack, etc. The goal is pointing out perverse incentives that will inevitably crop up inadvertently, unless the bill diligently accounts for the new weird legal contours it'd create.
[0] I'm assuming that ownership being recorded would be required to register to vote, as opposed to a voter registration being allowed to say "trust me I own real estate in this city via unrecorded deed"
You have to own property there, but maybe you can have an endless number of corporations share ownership of a property, or divide up the property into arbitrarily small parcels.
Not sure how much work I'd be willing to go through to gain control of Seaford DE, though.
Long Title: AN ACT TO AMEND THE CHARTER OF THE CITY OF SEAFORD RELATING TO THE CITY'S ABILITY TO AUTHORIZE ARTIFICIAL ENTITIES, LIMITED LIABILITY CORPORATIONS' PARTNERSHIPS AND TRUSTS TO VOTE IN MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS HELD IN SEAFORD.
Original Synopsis: This bill would allow the City of Seaford to authorize artificial entities, limited liability corporations' partnerships and trusts to vote in Municipal elections held in Seaford.
"""
Time to force Delaware out of the United States. We can let Puerto Rico in and Delaware can be their own country or something. Anything to stop their obscene obeisance to corporations from making things worse for the rest of us.
We have this for City of Melbourne in Australia. For city votes, it's compulsory for company representatives to lodge votes.
"In some cases a voter may have a number of entitlements to vote. For example, a voter may be a resident, own a property and be a director of a company that owns or occupies rateable property within the municipality."
https://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/about-council/governance-tr...
> Allow us to execute corporations and we have a deal
Fine, you dissolve the charter. What now? What happens to the entity’s assets? Its debts? Every proposal for a “corporate death penalty” is expropriation or fining, except with extra steps. Hell, if a regular threatened you with a fine and you could pull a “corporate death” card, why wouldn’t you do it?
Is it normal for the state legislature to make changes to a city charter? Why Seaford?
The title and synopsis are hiding some important info here.
- currently 'bona fide resident' requires owning property for 6 months
- with the changes in the bill, natural persons don't need to own property to be qualified to vote, but corporations do
- and non-resident natural persons who own property in the city are also eligible
So unfortunately it is _not_ as easy as creating a bunch of shell corporations to create a big external voting block; you also have to be able to buy property for each of them.
The city can't change its own charter. It's like a license from the state, granting certain powers to the city. Though usually the state legislature will offer some deference to the city for requested changes. Specifics vary by state.
> Is it normal for the state legislature to make changes to a city charter?
Yes, states almost always dictate how local governments are organized and run. In many states, they’ll have a pre approved list of charters that cab be adopted. For example, https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleVII/Ch... has the charters that cities and towns in Massachusetts can adopt. That said, Boston doesn’t have the freedom to adopt these forms of government and instead has a charter made up of a bunch of random state statutes. https://www.cityofboston.gov/Images_Documents/2007%20the%20c...
> Why Seaford?
The sponsor of the bill is from Seaford. Presumably, he’s doing so at the request of the local government.
> Is it normal for the state legislature to make changes to a city charter? Why Seaford?
Depends on context. New York City, for example, ceded control to Albany after going bankrupt. The same path appears proximate for San Francisco.
In this case it looks like enabling legislation. Dover isn’t giving Seaford’s corporations a vote. It’s giving Seaford the right to give corporations a vote.
> In this case it looks like enabling legislation. Dover isn’t giving Seaford’s corporations a vote. It’s giving Seaford the right to give corporations a vote.
What leads you to say this? I'm a layperson so I may be missing something, but the language that the bill adds as section 7(A)(2) seems like it is saying (property-owning) corporations are qualified voters, and 7(B) doesn't seem like it gives the city some discretion to decide among qualified voters who can actually register.
To be honest your best bet is probably a whole bunch of general partnerships that are all general partners in a general partnership that owns some land in town. It’s going to cost you a couple bucks to set up a LLC and even more for a corporation but you can form a partnership for free in a bout eight words.
It's funny to read so many commenters take on supposedly antidemocratic aspects of such bill while completely negating the democratic right of those who live in those places to actually decide what is deemed democratic for them.
Who said any of these llc owners live in Delaware? They may but not necessarily.
Also, we’ve long had the concept of having only one residence. You may own property in multiple places but you are only a resident of one. You may be a tax resident of multiple places but you are only a resident of one. Anything else IS anti-democratic as it favors the fortunate over the common person.
This is unnecessary as they already buy politicians outright with essentially unlimited money from corporate interests. It just confirms the charade as an undemocratic lie.
"I don’t vote. Fuck ’em. FUCK THEM. I don't vote. Two reasons. Two reasons I don’t vote: first of all, it’s meaningless. This country was bought and sold and paid for a long time ago. The shit they shuffle around every four years doesn’t mean a fuckin’ thing. And secondly, I don't vote 'cause I believe if you vote, you have no right to complain. People like to twist that around. I know, they say, they say: "well if you don't vote you have no right to complain". But where's the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent people, and they get into office and screw everything up, well you are responsible for what they have done, YOU caused the problem, you voted them in, you have no right to complain. I on the other hand, who did not vote, WHO DID NOT VOTE. Who in fact did not even leave the house on election-day, am in no way responsible for what these people have done, and have every RIGHT to complain as loud as I want, about the mess YOU created, that I had nothing to do with." - George Carlin
This is just votes for representation in local government which is already something like a smoothing function over a largely stochastic process.
Voting is also the least effective method to influence and lobby in local politics; corporations and wealthy outsiders of course long held the upper hand in this space.
We might as well just cut out the middle-men. Screw it, can we just elect corporations directly to Congress and be done with it? At least then we could stop pretending that these jerks represent the people.
For context, Seaford, the city to which this would apply, is in a section of the state pejoratively known as "Slower Lower" Delaware. It's largely rural and largely conservative -- at least compared with the top part of the state and the beach areas.
The bill's sponsors are both Republicans, who hold minorities in both the state House and the state Senate. As you can see in this map of 2020 presidential election results, although the state is heavily blue, Seaford is in the only county where Trump got a majority of votes: https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/delaware/
My take is that this is a political statement more than a legitimate legislative attempt.
It's one town of 8,000 people trying to allow non-residents who own property through LLCs still vote.
It might be bad, but the title feels misleading to me.