How I Voted at Hain, Cisco & Accuray

I waited too long to vote on the MoxyVote.com platform. However, even waiting until the day before the meeting, I was still only able to get minimal advice. I hearty thanks goes out to CalSTRS and their cooperation with ProxyDemocracy.org. At least they had announced votes for Hain and Accuray as I cast my votes this morning.

At Hain, I voted down the line with CalSTRS, withholding votes from director nominees Berke, Futterman and Meltzer, as well as voting against the long-term stock plan proposed by management. At Accuray, I would have voted with CalSTRS and management. However, the ProxyVote platform wouldn’t accept the control number provided to me by my broker. With all the proxy plumbing issues mentioned in the SEC’s concept release, I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised with this glitch. I contacted my broker. We’ll see how quickly they can resolve this.

Since not even CalPERS had announced votes at Cisco, I was on my own. I voted abstain on all the director nominees and other measures except that I voted in favor of the shareowner resolution on environmental sustainability reporting and steps to reduce possible human rights violations. Just as an experiment, I left one field blank to see if Broadridge had addressed the blank vote issue. They had not. After voting, a second page comes up asking to confirm my vote. At the top of that page, in very small print obscured by the gray background the following note appeared.  “*No vote entered.  Your vote will be cast as recommended by the soliciting committee.” And there was a small asterisk next to the vote I left blank.

Obviously, there is much work to be done to improve proxy voting. Here in voting three stocks, I was only able to obtain voting advice on two. On one of the stocks I ran into a proxy plumbing issue. I also confirmed that blank votes are still being turned over to management with only the most obscure warning. For more about that issue, see Don’t Let Companies Change Shareholders’ Blank Votes, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation.