The annual business meeting is where we elect the board of directors, international officers, and amend our governing documents.  This year, Proposal A was on the table for small changes to the nominating process, district leader titles, and creating new legal entities.

In previous years, we’ve occasionally seen a district that collected 100% of the proxies, but this is quite rare.  In 2013, the average was 74% (and there was a Proposal A to amend the club constitution), but this year, it was just 68.4% (quorum is 33.3%).

The districts coming closest to representing all its clubs were:

• D17 (western Australia) at 95.1% (missed 4 clubs)
• D66 (central Virginia) at 93.9%
• D93 (South Korea) at 93.7%

At the other end of the scale, we had:

• D79 (Saudi Arabia) at 29.6%
• D51 (peninsular Malaysia) at 34.7%
• D68 (Louisiana, western Mississippi, parts of southeast Texas) at 40.4%

The top quarter of districts beat 81% representation, the top half beat 72%, and the top 3/4 beat 58%.

The vast majority of the votes come from clubs (99.1%, 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 859 people voting at the business meeting (got a voting device), more than any previous year.  Of those, 98 were District Directors and 186 were at-large members (who often had proxies from a few of their own clubs as well).  That leaves 575 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-2015 (Sessions 1-3 refer to the 3 times that credentials was open to pick up votes.)

Here’s my post on the 2013 proxy returns.