{"id":39633,"date":"2004-04-27T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-04-27T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2004\/04\/27\/nobody-said-it-was-a-democracy\/"},"modified":"2004-04-27T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2004-04-27T07:00:00","slug":"nobody-said-it-was-a-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20040427-00\/?p=39633","title":{"rendered":"Nobody said it was a democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s proxy season, which means I&#8217;ve been reading through  proxy statement after proxy statement.\n  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.allstate.com\/investor\/proxy\/2002\/2002proxy.html#toc_de1431_1\">  The proxy voting rules for Allstate aren&#8217;t very democratic<\/a>.  Scroll down to &#8220;How votes are counted and discretionary voting  authority&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"LeftBorderLine\"><p>  The thirteen nominees who receive the most votes  will be elected to the open directorships  even if they get less than a majority of the votes.  <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>  Okay, let&#8217;s see, how many nominees are there?  Oh, exactly thirteen.\n  How convenient.\n  In other words: These thirteen people will be elected to directorships  regardless of what you do.\n  So of course I voted against all of them.\n  Later, I realized that I had fallen into their trap.\n  You see, the only way I could stop these people from becoming  directors was to <strong>withhold my vote and attempt to hinder  a quorum<\/strong>.  Under these rules, a &#8220;no&#8221; vote is as good as a &#8220;yes&#8221; vote!<\/p>\n<p>  Allstate isn&#8217;t the only company to rig their elections.  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.baxter.com\/about_baxter\/investor_information\/annual_report\/\">Baxter<\/a> and  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wyeth.com\/\">Wyeth<\/a>  (can&#8217;t find proxy online)  have similarly sham elections.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s proxy season, which means I&#8217;ve been reading through proxy statement after proxy statement. The proxy voting rules for Allstate aren&#8217;t very democratic. Scroll down to &#8220;How votes are counted and discretionary voting authority&#8221;: The thirteen nominees who receive the most votes will be elected to the open directorships even if they get less than [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-39633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>It&#8217;s proxy season, which means I&#8217;ve been reading through proxy statement after proxy statement. The proxy voting rules for Allstate aren&#8217;t very democratic. Scroll down to &#8220;How votes are counted and discretionary voting authority&#8221;: The thirteen nominees who receive the most votes will be elected to the open directorships even if they get less than [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39633\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}