Brokers, Broadridge and others concerned with the low voter turnout under e-proxy should encourage retail shareowners to make use of Proxy Democracy (PD), which aggregates, displays and automatically e-mails to subscribers proxy votes announced in advance by respected shareholder activist funds like CalPERS, Florida SBA, AFSCME and others. This allows retail shareowners, such as the members or investors in these funds, to copy the voting behavior of these trusted “brands.”

• PD also rates funds based on resistance to management (a rather primitive scale indeed) and allows users to create their own more sophisticated ratings based on fund voting behavior. Such ratings can be held private or shared with other site users.

• PD is working to display all the votes by funds on a single page or cluster of pages. Then a fund member or investor could click one button to see all the fund’s votes and the rationale, if provided by the fund.

• PD is also working to allow shareowners to vote directly though PD and/or have PD vote on their behalf, based on shareowner values and how they align with the votes of respected funds. Users will be able to override any PD vote made on their behalf.

The more funds that announce their votes in advance, the more brands are available, the more influence funds will have over otherwise mostly apathetic potential voters. Readers of the Harvard Law School Corporate Governance Blog should encourage the mutual funds they invest in, their pension funds, and university endowments to announce their proxy votes in advance and to get listed on PD.