Proxy voting
For a large and diverse state legislature, each citizen chooses to vote through any of the districts or official electoral associations in the country.
Republicans opposed proxy voting on the grounds that it allowed an indolent Democratic majority to move legislation through committee with antimajoritarian procedures.
[11] Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi temporary reinstated proxy voting in 2020 for members who were unable to be physically present in the chamber due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
[14] Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein write, "In a large and fragmented institution in which every member has five or six places to be at any given moment, proxy voting is a necessary evil".
[18] Another criticism is that it violates the concept of a secret ballot, in that paperwork may be filed, for instance, designating a party worker as one's proxy.
James C. Miller III, Ronald Reagan's budget director, suggested scrapping representative democracy and instead implementing a "program for direct and proxy voting in the legislative process.
According to Arch Puddington et al., in Albanian Muslim areas, many women have been effectively disenfranchised through proxy voting by male relatives.
[27] David Stewart and Keith Archer opine that proxy voting can result in leadership selection processes to become leader-dominated.
[28] Proxy voting had only been available to military personnel since World War II, but was extended in 1970 and 1977 to include voters in special circumstances such as northern camp operators, fishermen, and prospectors.
The Gabon respondent to an Inter-Parliamentary Union letter commented, "It has been observed that this possibility was exploited to a far greater extent by men than by women, for reasons not always noble.
[37] In 2003, India's People's Representative Act was amended to allow armed forces personnel to appoint a proxy to vote on their behalf.
[39] Some instances of proxy voting (usually by family members) in the Russian parliamentary elections of 1995 were noted by observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
[44] In 2004, two Liberal Democrat councillors were found guilty of submitting 55 fraudulent proxy votes and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment.
[45] The Electoral Reform Society has proposed the abolition of proxy voting in the UK except in special circumstances such as when the voter is abroad.
According to Charles Seymour and Donald Paige Frary, had not proxy voting been implemented, the inhabitants of the frontier towns would have lost their franchises, and the government would have represented only the freemen in the vicinity of Boston.
The roads were poor; the drawing of all a village's men at once would have exposed it to Indian attacks; and at election time, the emigrants' labor was needed to get the spring planting into the ground.
[52] After Ira Eastman's near-victory in New Hampshire, Republicans supported a bill to allow soldiers to vote by proxy, but it was ruled unconstitutional by the state supreme court.
It is essentially a compromise between the party-state, which wants to have high turnouts as proof of public support, and voters who do not want to go to the polling stations.
"[75] RONR opines, "Ordinarily it should neither be allowed nor required, because proxy voting is incompatible with the essential characteristics of a deliberative assembly in which membership is individual, personal, and nontransferable.
The people who have furnished the majority of the capital should control the organization, and yet they may live in different parts of the country, or be traveling at the time of the annual meeting.
[83] Some people favored requiring members attending the convention to bring a certain number of proxies, in order to encourage them to politick.
[84] In 2006, the party repealed those bylaw provisions due to concerns that a small group of individuals could use it to take control of the organization.
[85] Under the common law, shareholders had no right to cast votes by proxy in corporate meetings without special authorization.
In Walker v. Johnson,[86] the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia explained that the reason was that early corporations were of a municipal, religious or charitable nature, in which the shareholder had no pecuniary interest.
The attorneys for the plaintiff argued that the common law rules had no application to trading or moneyed corporations where the relation was not personal.
The court found, "The fact that it is a business corporation in no wise dispenses with the obligation of all members to assemble together, unless otherwise provided, for the exercise of a right to participate in the election of their officers."
[1]: 4 Under Securities Exchange Commission Rule 14a-3, the incumbent board of directors' first step in soliciting proxies must be the distribution to shareholders of the firm's annual report.
[96] This ruling has been criticized on many grounds, including the contention that it places unnecessary burdens on investment advisers and would not have prevented the major accounting scandals of the early 2000s.
The stock-transfer book is closed at least ten days before the annual meeting to enable the secretary to prepare a list of stockholders and the number of shares held by each.
In 2005, in a pilot study in Pakistan, Structural Deep Democracy, SD2[107][108] was used for leadership selection in a sustainable agriculture group called Contact Youth.
