June 27, 2026
Have a Corporate Day
Timothy Birdnow
Here is an article in the somewhat unreliable Natural News about a small town in Delaware (the state that gave us Joe Biden) granting voting rights to, drumroll please! Corporations.
The town is named Fenwick, which I find rather suspicious in that that is the name of the tiny principality in the classic Peter sellers movie The Mouse that Roared.
So I did a Duckduckgo search and found that, yes indeed, there is a beach town named Fenwick and it did indeed pass an ordinance allowing corporations to vote - and a judge upheld this in court.
Corporations are legal entities that are treated as individuals under law, but only for tax and regulatory purposes. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled they have free speech rights. This is a next logical step I fear, but it is way over the line.
The Constitution limits voting to citizens and it cannot be argued that corporations are citizens. (Neither are robots, which the article worries is the next step.) This law gets around it by only being applicable to local elections but it's the nose of the camel in the tent; in time it will be applied more and more.
Corporate voting simply dilutes the votes of the People and is thus something neither desirable nor practical.
The Natural News article frets about the implications:
Once you grant voting rights to fictional constructs, the next logical step is extending them to robots. Saudi Arabia already granted citizenship to Sophia, a humanoid robot, in 2017 [2]. Susan Liautaud, in her book "The Power of Ethics," describes Sophia's reception as a "social humanoid robot" that travels the world for speaking engagements [3]. And European officials have been exploring granting robots legal status to "guarantee a standard level of safety and security" [4]. Fenwick is not an isolated oddity -- it's part of a coordinated global push to normalize non-human voting.
One could, I suppose, argue AI's are persons and as such entitled to vote. What would happen if this were to be implemented? There would be AI's everywhere voting as their human masters program them to and the vote would hence become meaningless.
I would add Spain has also granted "personhood" to apes, so in time our planet might be ruled by "damned dirty apes".
The NN article is right; this is the coming thing. And it will, in time, make elections a mere show.
BTW I suspect with Fenwick being a beach town there are more businesses there than residents and they were complaining about being cut out of the policy-making process. But it sets a bad precedent and if it can be done here it can be done anywhere.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
11:42 AM
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