On July 23, 2026, Free Speech For People filed an amicus brief before the Delaware Supreme Court in partnership with the League of Women Voters of Delaware and local counsel Mark Billion in support of the ACLU of Delaware’s lawsuit challenging a provision in the Town of Fenwick Island’s Charter that authorizes voting by property-owning corporations and other artificial entities in town elections.

Fenwick is a small town in Delaware with a government that runs like any other town government. But instead of giving its residents and human property owners sole authority to elect its representatives, Fenwick Island, since 2008, also has allowed artificial entities to vote in its municipal elections, provided that artificial entity owns property in the town and is organized under the laws of Delaware.

In 2025, the ACLU of Delaware brought suit in Superior Court, arguing that Fenwick’s charter violated the “Elections Clause” of Delaware’s Constitution, which guarantees that “[a]ll elections shall be free and equal.” The Town of Fenwick moved to dismiss the complaint, arguing that it is entitled to treat corporations as people for voting purposes, and that their system was constitutional because each corporation only got one vote. The Superior Court agreed, dismissing the case without allowing the ACLU of Delaware to conduct discovery or establish facts to prove its case.

The ACLU of Delaware has now filed an appeal before the Supreme Court of Delaware to preserve the rights of natural persons to choose their own elected representatives. In support of the ACLU of Delaware’s important position, Free Speech For People has filed an amicus brief on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Delaware and Free Speech For People.

As explained in detail in this amicus brief, the Superior Court’s decision must be reversed. Its reasoning threatens bedrock assumptions of our constitutional democracy: people vote, not economic interests, and each person gets one vote, and faces the same qualifications, regardless of how much property they own.

First, in Reynolds v. Sims, the Supreme Court emphatically stood for the principle of representative democracy by the people, not corporations or economic interests:

“As long as ours is a representative form of government, and our legislatures are those instruments of government elected directly by and directly representative of the people, the right to elect legislators in a free and unimpaired fashion is a bedrock of our political system.”

In Reynolds, the Court rejected the contention that a state could weigh votes to ensure that various “economic interests” were represented. Fenwick cannot sidestep Reynolds by giving the vote directly to economic interests like LLCs and corporations.

Second, voting by artificial entities violates the well-established principle at the foundation of our democracy: “one person, one vote.”

Fenwick’s Charter claims that it abides by this rule by giving each artificial entity one vote. It doesn’t. The one person, one vote rule cannot be squared with artificial entity voting.

A resident of Fenwick gets one vote. A person who owns property in Fenwick gets one vote. But a resident of Fenwick who owns property via an LLC gets two votes—after all, the LLC is a different “person” under Fenwick’s rules. A person who owns multiple LLCs that each own a piece of property in Fenwick, gets as many votes as LLCs they control. If a person owns a single property, but creates multiple LLCs that each own a slice of that property, that person too gets as many votes as LLCs.

These corporations—or more specifically, the people who control the corporations and therefore the votes granted to the corporations—are not subject to the same qualifications as human voters. For instance, in Fenwick, human voters must be eighteen, citizens, and either reside in Fenwick or own property there. But artificial entities are only required to be organized under the laws of Delaware and own property in Fenwick; the people who own those entities therefore control votes without having to satisfy the conditions that all natural person voters must satisfy.

The Supreme Court has ruled again, and again, and again, that property qualifications in municipal elections are unconstitutional and that municipal elections must follow the one person, one vote rule. If municipalities may not limit the franchise to property owners, it follows they may not grant property owners privileges like multiple votes or a pass on having their qualifications examined—as the Delaware Supreme Court has already ruled.

The Supreme Court has recognized only extraordinarily narrow exception to these democratic principles: namely, when the state creates a special interest district, like a water resource district, that lacks general powers of government, has narrow and specific responsibilities, and typically does not have residents like a normal town might. This exception does not apply to Fenwick, which appoints a police force, levies taxes, enacts zoning ordinances, grants business licenses, maintains public works, and allocates the town budget.

No town—whether Fenwick or any other—should be allowed to bypass Reynolds, to unconstitutionally dilute the voting power of natural persons, or subject its residents to rule by corporations and other artificial entities. The U.S. Supreme Court correctly rejected a system in which votes might be allocated to economic interests instead of people, recognizing the danger that such a system posed to our representative democracy. The Delaware Supreme Court should reject this newest attempt to prioritize economic interests and property over people, and reassert this foundational principle of our democracy.

Read FSFP’s amicus brief here.