Moxy Vote Blog

“Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.”

— William Shakespeare
The Second Part of Henry the Sixt, Act IV, Scene 7, 1591

“How about moxyvote….How hard was it to post their numbers.  I knew they were a piece of crap start up company that could not be trusted.”

— info4netdata
Yahoo Finance message boards, February, 2010

Shakespeare had a point. Our knowledge sets man apart. It helps us discover, understand and transform our world, our very existence. Man’s thirst for knowledge enabled the descendants of wandering bands of tribesmen to peer into the depths of other galaxies and into the depths of atoms. Knowledge cures disease, allows freedom, and helps to create truly beautiful things. It provides the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.

An overachieving hominid, Man can be frustrated when knowledge is difficult to attain. info4netdata, expressing this frustration, was stymied by Moxy Vote’s inability or unwillingness to share knowledge about the votes of On2 shareholders in the proposal to merge their company with Google. Why weren’t we publishing the vote results? After all, in our open society, it’s quite reasonable to expect immediate, clear, and reliable information.

In this case, we could not provide it. Here’s why.

There are two ways to vote your proxy on our website:

1. You can get your proxy ballots automatically delivered to us. After your broker forwards your ballots, you can see the advocates’ opinions, and you can vote the ballots from our site. In this case, we’ll know how many votes you have submitted.
2. If you’ve received a ballot elsewhere, you can share its control number with us, and we’ll allow you to research and vote. In this case, we will NOT know how many votes you have submitted. Yes, the voting works — all your shares will be voted — we simply won’t learn the total.

To date, most of the ballots submitted through our site have been voted through the second method, so we can’t publish vote totals. Because we were just getting started, our proxy processor did us a favor and shared some vote totals specifically for the On2 merger. We didn’t get the vote totals for the final shareholder’s meeting, as info4netdata desired, but any numbers we published were reliable. As we grow, though, we do not expect to regularly know votes submitted by control number.

If you’ve been paying attention to our site, you noticed a change in the last week. We’re now showing data on the total number of people who voted and the total number of “known” shares. We still can’t publish the total SHARES voted, but we’ll give you the best information we’ve got.

Back when Moxy Vote was little more than an idea on our whiteboard, we drew up a list of influential people who might eventually be interested in this project. One of the names on the list was Eliot Spitzer.  Yes, THE Eliot Spitzer, former Governor and Attorney General of New York. In these roles, Spitzer had a history of fighting for the little guy’s right to an even playing field on Wall Street, which meshes nicely with our goals at Moxy Vote.

In a surprising twist, we rolled into the offices last week to find that Spitzer already knows what we’re up to, and he’s writing about it on Slate. Here’s his neat summary of the opportunity we face:

About 25 percent of shares are held by retail investors—owners like you and me, as opposed to mutual funds, pension funds, or hedge funds. This 25 percent block of votes presents a huge opportunity, because only about one-quarter of that block votes. In other words, 18 percent of all shareholders are simply sitting out. After the economic cataclysm of the past two years, one might think the opportunity to bring these new voters to the table—just as in the 2008 campaign, is real. How to do it is the issue.

Technology may be the answer. Several Web sites focused on corporate proxy voting are hoping to emulate the success of recent political campaigns.

He then goes on to describe Moxy Vote, ProxyDemocracy, and ShareOwners.org, each of whom has a different plan to rally the retail vote.

We too think the world will be a better place when people tune in and get involved.  We’re honored to be on your radar screen, Mr. Spitzer, and thanks to Slate for helping to spread the word.