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%, in 2017 it was 67.8%, and in 2018 it was 70.8% (quorum is 33.3%).

The districts coming closest to representing all their clubs were:

• D21 (Southern British Columbia, Canada) at 100% of 147 clubs (they “only” got 83% last year)
• D70 (Sydney, southern New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory, Australia) at 99.5%, 203 of 204 clubs (missed one club, they were two clubs short last year)
• D112 (Northern New Zealand) at 99.4%, 162 of 163 clubs (missed one club)

At the other end of the scale, we had:

• D76 (Japan) at 3.1%, just 6 of 192 clubs (was 76% last year)
• D111 (Brazil territorial council) at 5.0%, just 1 of 20 clubs
• D105 (Oman, UAE, Jordan, Lebanon) at 17.0%, just 18 of 106 clubs

The fourth district in this ranking was at 34.6%. I think that for those three districts above, the district director may have failed to go through credentials to pick up their votes; perhaps they were unable to attend the convention due to a visa issue or last-minute emergency (though WHQ has a process for allowing the next-ranking district leader to pick up proxies).

The top quarter of districts beat 85% representation, the top half beat 72%, and the top 3/4 beat 61% (overall 2 percentage points higher than last year).

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-2018

Here’s my post on the 2017 proxy returns.