21 Issuers Named And Shamed For Providing No Time To Vote

Governance guru Jim McRitchie’s post on his Corp.Gov.com website - with his review of a survey on 31 virtual annual meeting practices conducted by the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility - was amplified considerably by a John Jenkins post on CorporateCounsel.net in September. Readers will recall, we hope, that we called attention to the issue of “No time to vote at VSMs” in our second quarter issue – and offered a model script that allows for sufficient time.  One of the questions asked by the ICRR survey was “How many seconds did shareholders have to vote after the last proposal was presented?” Jim says that the answer is “not many”:

The ICCR survey documents that 10 out of 31 companies allowed 0-10 seconds to vote at annual meetings after proposals were presented. Five allowed up to 30 seconds. six allowed 50-60 seconds and 10 – or just a third of the companies IRRC listened in on - allowed a “reasonable” two minutes or more to vote. 

McRitchie told us he contacted the SEC on this and we – and he – agree that this is a very simple problem to fix. So please get on it, by going to How And When To Properly Open And Close The Polls  – and follow our easy-to-follow model run-of-show, and script.