Does Confidential Proxy Voting Matter?

Confidential voting in corporate proxies is a principal recommendation in activist institutional investors' guidelines for corporate governance reforms. This paper examines the impact of the adoption of confidential voting on proposal outcomes through a panel data set of shareholder and management proposals submitted from 1986-98 to 130 firms that adopted confidential voting in those years. Institutional investors promoting confidential voting maintain that private sector institutions have conflicts of interest that prevent them from voting against management even though to do so would maximize the value of their shares; they contend that anonymous ballots will enable such investors to vote their true interest, and thereby anticipate reduced support for management proposals and increased support for shareholder proposals. The paper finds, contrary to confidential voting advocates' expectations, that adoption of confidential voting has no significant effect on voting outcomes. Voting outcomes are best explained by proposal type; neither institutional nor insider ownership, nor prior performance, significantly affect the level of support a proposal receives. Moreover, the conflict of interest hypothesis is not supported in the data, as private institutional holdings post-adoption of the voting reform do not affect the support level for proposals. Confidential voting also does not affect firms' stock performance. The results suggest that institutional investor initiatives directed at confidential voting are not a fruitful allocation of investors' resources

Questions and Answers for Foundations on Proxy Voting

Discusses common questions about proxy voting, including legal issues, voting commingled funds, options for voting and for delegating voting authority; trends in foundations' involvement in shareholder advocacy; and examples of active foundations

Unlocking the Power of the Proxy: How Active Foundation Proxy Voting Can Protect Endowments and Boost Philanthropic Mission

Outlines how active proxy voting on corporate governance or social issues can strengthen a foundation's charitable mission and long-term shareholder value. Offers a step-by-step guide to developing and implementing proxy voting guidelines, with examples

Coercion-resistant Proxy Voting

In general, most elections follow the principle of equality, or as it came to be known, the principle of “one man – one vote”. However, this principle might pose difficulties for voters, who are not well informed regarding the particular matter that is voted on. In order to address this issue, a new form of voting has been proposed, namely proxy voting. In proxy voting, each voter has the possibility to delegate her voting right to another voter, so called proxy, that she considers a trusted expert on the matter. In this paper we propose an end-to-end verifiable Internet voting scheme, which to the best of our knowledge is the first scheme to address voter coercion in the proxy voting setting

Proxy Voting Power in Non-Profit Organizations

This note will briefly survey the state of American law as to proxy voting in non-profit organizations. It will deal first with member voting by proxy, and then with proxy voting by representatives (delegates, committeemen,directors or trustees)

Exercising Authority, Restoring Accountability: AFL-CIO Proxy Voting Guidelines

[Excerpt] We are pleased to provide trustees of union benefit funds with revised AFL-CIO Proxy Voting Guidelines. These Guidelines have been updated to reflect major regulatory reforms enacted in 2002 and 2003, and to further raise the bar on corporate governance and accountability in the wake of recent corporate scandals