The annual business meeting is where we elect the board of directors, international officers, and amend our governing documents. This year, Proposals A and B were on the table to allow WHQ to move to another state and formalizing the audit committee.
In previous years, we’ve occasionally seen a district that collected 100% of the proxies, but this is quite rare. In 2015, the average was 68%, and this year, it was 70% (quorum is 33.3%).
The districts coming closest to representing all their clubs were:
- D90 (New South Wales, Australia) at 100% (well done!)
- D70 (Sydney, southern New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory, Australia) at 98.9% (missed two clubs, out of 189)
- D49 (Hawaii) at 98.5% (missed one club, out of 66)
At the other end of the scale, we had:
- D85 (north China) at 1.5% (only two clubs represented)
- D15 (Central Idaho, eastern Oregon, Utah, western Wyoming, eastern Nevada) at 9.2% (only eight clubs represented)
- D79 (Saudi Arabia) at 30.0%
It’s clear from the very small numbers that the district directors failed to pick up their votes for district 85 and 15, meaning those clubs who submitted proxies were then unrepresented at the business meeting. That’s a very rare miss.
The top quarter of districts beat 86% representation, the top half beat 74%, and the top 3/4 beat 60%.
The vast majority of the votes come from clubs (99.2%, two per club), the rest are “at large” members, which is any current or past International Director (which includes International Presidents and officers), and the current District Directors (they each get one vote, regardless of any clubs they also may represent). At-large members must attend in person, they cannot give their vote to someone else.
Of those votes from clubs, the large majority are represented by the District Directors. There’s no way of knowing just how many, but based on my informal observations working in credentials, it’s probably 80% or more of the votes. There were 813 people voting at the business meeting (got a voting device), more than any previous year. Of those, 102 were District Directors and 176 were at-large members (who often had proxies from a few of their own clubs as well). That leaves 535 non-DD/non-at-large voters, and they usually seemed to have votes for just one to three clubs, often from clubs in or near the convention city.
While there are many things more important for Toastmasters districts to devote scarce resources to (no, not speech contests, I mean helping struggling clubs and building new clubs), this is the sort of thing that shouldn’t be that hard to do. A district proxy chair with a committee to call clubs and round up proxies makes an excellent High Performance Leadership (HPL) project!
Full details in the Excel spreadsheet here: proxies-2016 (Sessions 1-4 refer to the 4 times that credentials was open to pick up votes.)
Here’s my post on the 2015 proxy returns.
Mike,
Do you have any other years prior to 2015?
Thanks!
Yes, just search on “proxies” in the search box, or for each one, I include a link to the previous one at the bottom, they’re chained together.
Districts 15 & 85 Directors,
Ought to apoligize to both the clubs in the District.
Going forward, i would hope in DDP Distingished District Plan, a goal of a minimum percentage of club proxies, be set, with some results, for failure, such every percentage, below the midian not be reimbured?
That could present some other problems though. Would it be a requirement, like district officer training and the budget? If it’s at the start of the year, missing it would mean the whole year is a waste. It can’t really be done at the end, as the results have to be finalized by July 1.
I do agree that reimbursement should be prohibited when it’s an egregious miss like this, unless there’s a very good reason (e.g., a last-hour medical issue).