A great divide exists in the voting power of shareholders in the United States.  The majority of American companies have one share, one vote, but more and more companies are going public with a dual-class stock structure. Here, the voting power rests in the hands of the founders or another group of shareholders.  It’s time to consider an alternative: “tenure voting,” a system in which shareholders accumulate more votes the longer they hold stock.  Dual-class stock, which must be adopted in the initial public offering stage, is all the rage and is not just found at Google and Facebook. Pure Storage, First Data and Square have all gone public with dual-class stock. Last year, some 13.5 percent of I.P.O.s included some type of dual-class stock, according to Dealogic  As I’ve written before, this creates a culture of “haves” and “have-nots.” The haves with dual-class stock are protected from shareholder activism and insulated from shareholder demands. The have-nots are on the run — in constant fear of demands from activist investors.  The difference comes down to the value of a vote.  In the case of dual-class stock, either your vote is worth nothing or everything. The founders essentially control the company and wield influence more or less with impunity. This insulates the company from shareholder activism and indeed from the other shareholders. The other shareholders, meanwhile, have worthless votes.  The idea can work well in principle. Concentrating voting power with the founders allows them to steer the corporate culture and look to the long term. But there are examples where it has gone horribly awry, as with Sumner Redstone at Viacom and CBS. Mr. Redstone has refused to give up control of the companies despite his apparent ill health at age 92.  In the rest of corporate America, shareholders have one vote for every share. This has the same flaws as American democracy. Too often your vote doesn’t count and many shareholders don’t bother to vote. Everyone also has the same kind of voting power, from an index fund that can hold a stock for decades to day traders who care only about the next five minutes.  In other words, neither model works in all cases. In addition, this binary world does not reflect an increasingly complicated reality. Today, founders reflexively go about adopting dual-class stock whether it is good or bad for the company. Dual-class stock may work well at Facebook, but whether it does at Fairway Group Holdings, the struggling grocery store chain that appears to be heading for default on its loans, is another story.  The one-share, one-vote companies, meanwhile, are vulnerable to being pushed into quick fixes at the expense of the business long term. Activist hedge funds press companies to enact spinoffs, big share buybacks or other financial engineering tricks to generate a pop in the stock price. And then the activists walk away. This can be a real problem.  After all, how else can we explain a Rube Goldberg-type transaction like the merger of Dow Chemical and DuPont, to be followed by a split of the combined company into three different ones? Such a complex and potentially risky transaction would not have happened if the two companies had not been pushed by shareholder activists.  The charge is heatedly disputed by the activists, who contend that they are simply making companies more efficient. They have a point: Activists have successfully overhauled many staid companies like Darden Restaurants, owner of Olive Garden, where the chief executive was accused of spending several months a year serving on other boards while his own business declined.  There is, however, a potential middle ground in shareholder voting — a system that diverts power from founders while allowing companies to reward longer-term shareholders.  Enter tenure voting. In a paper I released this week with David J. Berger and Aaron J. Benjamin of the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, we outline the potential of this system.  In tenure voting, more votes are given to shareholders the longer they hold shares. So for example, if you hold shares for three years at the company you will have three votes per share.  The award of more votes for a longer holding period is intended to empower those shareholders who stick with the company. They will presumably have a greater stake in the welfare of the company.  It can also provide a counterweight in a dual-class setup. The founders may still have a larger voting bloc, but the power held by long-term institutional investors would grow over time. That would allow some measured shareholder activism, while limiting founder power.  The beauty of tenure voting is that it is devised to address short-termism while rewarding all shareholders. Blockchain technology can make it easier to track ownership of everyone’s shares to ensure they are given the right number of votes. (Blockchain technology, which is used by Bitcoin, would create a public ledger of all transactions.)  Will long-term shareholders value their new voting power? It is possible that such shareholders may become like sheep, never complaining and never trying to influence the company. They will hold and hold and sell only when the news is very bad.  Still, there are some indications that shareholders value the power to vote: Google’s “no vote” shares, for example, trade at a small discount to its one-vote shares.  Tenure voting is not a cure-all, to be sure. It may turn out that one share, one vote is best and we should simply reward whoever has the most shares.  Yet American companies are in a straitjacket because of the current Wall Street obsession on short-term methods and results. They dare not give shareholders any more voting power if they can help it. Otherwise, though, there are no checks on founders and management.  A middle path — tenure voting — seems worth trying.  Steven Davidoff Solomon is a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. His columns can be found at nytimes.com/dealbook. Follow @stevendavidoff on Twitter.  A version of this article appears in print on March 2, 2016, on page B5 of the New York edition with the headline: Tenure Voting Could Shift the Balance of Corporate Power. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
A system that awards more votes the longer shares are held would empower shareholders and balance the interests of management and activists.