Two Seminal Proxy Cases: Hooray For Our Side:

WA Judge Rules That The Delivery Of Proxies And Proxy Tabulations “Did Not Legally Constitute

Readers of our last issue noted, we hope, the pending lawsuit by serial proxy-fighters Stilwell Value Partners v. First Financial Northwest, Inc. and our long-term business partner Ray Riley, who served as Inspector of election at the contested meeting in WA.—where the Stilwell Group failed to cast their votes by executing a ballot—and where our article warned, yet again, about the need for proxy holders to execute a “Ballot of the Appointed Proxies”—sometimes called a “Master Ballot”— in order to legally cast the votes that run to them.

Well, Hooray for Ray—and for the judicious and common sense reading of the plain appointing language that appears on every proxy card or VIF we’ve ever seen—which authorizes the designated proxies to vote, but leaves it to them to do so: Just as we went to press, WA. Superior Court Judge Beth M. Andrus denied Plaintiff ’s motion for Summary Judgment and granted in part (as described in the headline) but denied in part Defendants’ cross motion for Summary Judgment. A two-day trial is contemplated in January on a few “issues of fact” she’s still wrestling with – in order to bullet-proof her final ruling, we think, against a potential appeal…in a matter that, as we noted, has never come before a court…because, we say, the correct answer as to whether proxy cards “vote themselves” is so obvious.