Moxy Vote Blog

Last week, the launch of Moxy Vote was covered in the print and online editions of the Wall Street Journal, with a photo of a few of us!

Cari Tuna’s article outlines the sorry state of retail proxy participation – 87% of retail shareholders do not vote – and she describes the possibility of our site changing this.

The Philadelphia Inquirer also had some thoughts on our launch.

You’re throwing away proxy ballots all the time, right? Stop doing that. With Moxy Vote, we’ve made it easy to support the causes that you care about with your votes. Here’s how it works.

1. After you’ve registered, find a few advocates to support. We’ve enlisted the help of some thoughtful people at the Humane Society, Investors Against Genocide, the Teamsters, the Sisters of Mercy, and many other organizations who will recommend smart ways to vote your proxies. You should be able to find someone who stands for something important to you.
2. Send your proxy ballots our way.  We’ll contact your broker to get future proxy ballots delivered here so you can vote them from our site. To do this, login and add a brokerage account from your profile page.
3. Set up a priority queue.  Put your advocates in order so we know how you wish to align your votes – your top advocate will have dibs on any ballot item.  To set this up, login and manage your advocates from your profile page.
4. Vote!  Now, when your ballots are delivered to us, we’ll submit your votes before the deadline. If none of your advocates has an opinion on a ballot item, you can automatically vote with management’s recommendation. Or against. Or, having seen what the advocates have to say, you can vote manually.

This is a new thing. Please let us know how it goes.

It’s been many months in the making. We’ve met some great people, learned a lot, signed a few agreements, and taken our first stab at building something interesting.  So here it is.

Moxy Vote is our attempt to bring something important into the world.

It’s a proxy voting platform for retail shareholders. There are thousands of publicly-traded companies in the U.S.  They’re some of the most powerful influences on our daily lives, providing the food we eat, the cars we drive, and the medicines we take. These companies are owned by shareholders, who get to have a say in how they’re run. 30% of their shares are held by individual investors, people like you and me, while the other 70% are in the accounts of large, institutional shareholders.

Here’s the thing. The institutional shareholders are heard in corporate boardrooms. The retail shareholders – the little guys – are not.

Why not? The vast majority of retail shareholders simply don’t vote their proxy ballots, sacrificing their chance to influence corporate behavior.  The deck has been stacked against the small shareholders, who have not been able to easily access facts and viewpoints about things they can vote on, nor have they been able to connect with others to enjoy strength in numbers.

Note, there are two things the Internet is good at: allowing access to facts and viewpoints, and allowing people to connect with others.

Proxy voting does not have to be boring. It should be easy. The little guy should be heard.