The annual business meeting is where we elect the board of directors, international officers, and amend our governing documents.
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%, in 2016, it was 70%, and this year it was 67.8% (quorum is 33.3%).
The districts coming closest to representing all their clubs were:
- D90 (New South Wales, Australia) at 100% AGAIN (they did this last year as well, well done!)
- D70 (Sydney, southern New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory, Australia) at 99.0% (missed two clubs, identical to last year, well done!)
- D41 (North and West India) at 97.6%
At the other end of the scale, we had:
- D80 (Singapore) at 0% (not one proxy was picked up; there was confusion over what paperwork was needed for credentials)
- D102 (Malaysia) at 22.6%
- D75 (Philippines) at 27.0%
The top quarter of districts beat 82% representation, the top half beat 70%, and the top 3/4 beat 58%.
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.
Undistricted clubs are randomly assigned a default district director for their proxy, if they choose to do so (they can assign it to anyone, just like all other clubs). That’s why there’s no “U” line in the spreadsheet (and theoretically, a district could have more than 100% of the proxies).
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.
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-2017
Here’s my post on the 2016 proxy returns.
Just wondering, where did you get the data from?
WHQ staff posts this on paper outside the credentials room at the convention, but I just ask them to e-mail me a copy later, to avoid re-typing it all.
D90 was very fortunate to have Michael Said as the proxy prowler and I worked very closely with him as I explained in FB.
Kudos to our “Proxy Prowler”, Michael Said DTM, IP DD of D90. He has done this role for a few years, from before District 70 split into D70 & D90 to this conference. It allows us to talk with candidates as a group of knowledgeable and committed members.