Moxy Vote: totally not a piece of crap

William Shakespeare“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.

Eliot Spitzer on Moxy Vote

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.

On2 shareholders vote through Moxy Vote.

Big news. In the last week, Moxy Vote has been put through its first paces, and it appears to be working. We have processed proxy ballots for some shareholders of On2 Technologies — see some of their opinions on a proposed merger with Google here. As of last Tuesday, about 100 shareholders voted proxies representing 5.5 million shares through our site.

If you’re a shareholder of On2 and want to use Moxy Vote to submit a ballot, you will need your ballot’s control number. Once you have that, login to the site and complete the On2 ballot.

We weren’t expecting this activity so soon after we announced the site to the world. Thank you for your patience as we work around a few glitches.  This is the first step in a long journey, but judging by the shareholders’ enthusiasm, it looks like we’re heading in the right direction.

Thank you, On2 shareholders, for voting through Moxy Vote.

Again with the WSJ!

horn I don’t usually toot this many horns. But the Wall Street Journal just wrote about us again. Rob Curran lists many different ways that small investors can get involved in the governance process, and he’s singled out Moxy Vote as a good way to vote over the Web.

Welcome, shareholder!

thumbYou’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.

Let’s get this thing started.

quoteIt’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.