> So no you can't just spin up a bunch of LLCs to rig an election…
Sure you can. You just have to sell them some land as part of it.
Sure you can. You just have to sell them some land as part of it.
This is kind of a violation of the "one man one vote" ideal that is the bedrock of our society. It easily turns in to "money buys influence" which is exactly the opposite of what made the US a great country to live in. If you don't understand that and you're a US Citizen you should really retake the civics / political science classes from high school.
The judge effectively said in the conclusion "Trust me, there's no abuse and this is fine".
It would be void and regardless of recordation, no transfer or subdivision would have occurred.
But a new avenue has occurred to me that actually saves money on deed costs - nothing prevents multiple corporate entities from jointly owning a piece of real estate on one deed, right? So you could conceivably create one Delaware Series LLC, create an unlimited number of distinct legal entities with that, and then write one deed that lists all of those entities as joint owners of the single piece of real estate. Basically similar to multiple residents living in one house, and each getting a vote (but applied to infinitely scalable corporate entities!)
The fundamental flaw here is the law framing the entity itself as having voting rights (also why this attracts so much attention!), whereas if it were framed such that every beneficial owner with over say 35% of the ownership interest could vote, that would be intrinsically limiting.
Why would thirty companies that owned a company together get one vote each instead of one thirtieth? The thirty companies would each have one vote in determining how to vote the one parent's vote.
(You are, however, correct to note that you can record absolute gibberish if you want to, so long as you pay the recorder. This does not effectuate a transfer of land, though; it merely serves as constructive notice to the person who is bound to look for such recorded notice, i.e., the beneficial purchaser for value. In a way, you could think of the function of a recorder as preventer of race conditions, not the database).
Why would thirty companies each get a vote? Because that is what the charter says. There wouldn't be one parent company, rather the real estate would be owned by them all directly as tenants in common.
> 9. A. (2) Non-residents. Every property owner as of March 1 prior to the annual municipal election, whether a natural person or artificial entity, including but not limited to corporations, partnerships, trusts, and limited liability companies, and who is registered to vote, if provided by ordinance, shall have one (1) vote. A natural person shall be a citizen of the United States and age 18 on or before the date of the election. An artificial entity shall be a domestic entity in the State of Delaware.
https://charters.delaware.gov/fenwickisland.html
So they must be Delaware entities. Another thing I'm giving up on is that the Series LLC might not work. While each Series is legally independent from the others, I think they still might not be considered distinct "entities" (once again, not looking to give myself a headache to solidly determine that).
So either do one LLC/corporation per vote, or perhaps trusts might be even cheaper (no idea what filing/recording would be required for trusts, especially to substantiate them enough to register to vote)
Do you think Section 9A(3), which more or less says these rules would be construed under one person/entity, one vote would break your plan? I believe if you tried to have thirty voters tied to one parcel of land by joint tenancy, that would be how the court stops you. The plaintiff here is arguing vote dilution, but vote dilution gets multiplied by an arbitrary factor in your model.
There might be an angle where if a given person has the voting POA from two different entities, that person would still only get a single vote, limited by being a natural person? This doesn't seem to be the intent though.
To be [close to] sure you'd have to ask a Delaware attorney, as they should have a good handle on the jurisprudence around this topic.
If those thirty companies reconfigure their holdings so they each own one thirtieth of each of thirty parcels, under your model all of a sudden each company has thirty votes.
I believe if you tried to exploit the ambiguity in the law in a way that mattered enough for anyone to care, you would catch a lawsuit predicated on the idea that the one entity/one vote concept was violated by this trick. I think a court would approve of the idea.
I still agree with you that this law is poor, I just don’t think this exploit flies in court. But no one knows until they try.
No, because this is exactly what "one entity/one vote" directly limits. Each entity is still limited to a single vote.
I think if an outsider overtly bought a parcel, created hundreds or thousands of Delaware entities, titled that parcel over to all of them jointly, and tried to register them all to vote, we'd end up with a test case that the court might strike down. But I'd think someone exploiting it at scale, or a politically connected insider for whom the voting registrar looked the other way might get away with it.
What is the smallest subplot you can split a parcel into?
And are we talking literally land, or would condo ownership suffice? (After all, you typically stack a few condos on top of one parcel of land). The smallest condo is probably dictated by some pesky human habitability rules, but what class of property has the fewest minimum-square-footage zoning rules? Retail probably has egress rules, but what about industrial spaces?
Could you create an industrial park to house a bunch of, to use a rough metaphor, independently-owned/independently-operated phone booths (or whatever other "qualifying use")?
Basically is there a category of land-use you could split ownership off at ridiculous scale, offer LLC-as-a-service to buy a bunch of them, and just for fun, tokenize the votes to provably aggregate the absentee ballots at scale via blockchain?
If it's one-entity-one-vote, what is the most cost-effective way to maximize the number of qualifying entities?
Bonus points for every order of magnitude of synthetic votes you can reasonably achieve over the fleshy variety.
Where I am, things like dividing a 5 acre rural property so that a mother-in-law can live in a cottage near her family are routinely denied.
Let me save you some words.
Next time just call them "the local real estate developer slime balls" because that's who makes up the vase majority of these organizations. Like maybe a particularly upstanding town might have a local banker or lawyer on one of the boards or something.
These are not democratic institutions. They are business groups that happen to be part of government.
These organizations are already in the pocket of business interests. If anything this change is destabilizing because it now means that the PE owned car-wash and the company that owns a bunch of chain franchise businesses in the town as well as every local business that owns land or the landlords thereof but is owned by people who live in the surrounding towns can push back and say "screw you, we're not all willing to bend over and take it so you can make another buck developing another street of McMansions".
Letting megacorps vote is probably bad. But I think we should see where this goes. There's a lot of "enemy of my enemy" potential here for the currently disenfrachinsed business interests to push back on the business interests that are in bed with government to the benifit of the people. Enemy of my enemy is my ally and all that.
An acre, here. See your local zoning code or land statutes for minimum lot sizes. Consult agreements that run with the land for additional restrictions.
how many votes in that district do I have?