In Delaware, corporations can vote. So can LLCs, partnerships, and trusts, provided they own real property within the municipality where the election is taking place. In “The Company State,” capital not only has a voice – it has the franchise.
If there was anywhere in America you might expect to find a corporation casting a ballot, Delaware is it. When the self-proclaimed “Corporate Capital of the World” reached the milestone of a million human residents recently, the state was already home to over two million business entities. That’s by design: since 1911, Delaware has offered the best deal on US shores for registering a business cheaply, opaquely, and legally enough to avoid regulatory scrutiny – and as a result, it consistently wins the business of hosting multinational conglomerates and mom and pop real estate shell companies alike.
But Delaware's commitment to corporate power runs even deeper than its white shoe lawyers know. In 70% of Delaware municipalities, corporations and other “artificial entities” can vote in municipal elections, at least in some circumstances – and they exercise that right.
This paper will examine how and why corporate voting became widespread in Delaware – and explore what this means for our understanding of the links between business history and local governance. Tracking the legal and political history of corporate voting through case studies of five Delaware municipalities, I find that the practice has roots in nineteenth-century ideas about local government that premised membership in the political community on whiteness and property – but only flowered into full legal existence in the late 20th-century, when neoliberal approaches to suburban development changed who could hold a stake in local governance.