The annual Toastmasters 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 usually quite rare. In 2015, the average was 68%, in 2016 it was 70%, in 2017 it was 67.8%, in 2018 it was 70.8%, and in 2019 it was 73.5% (quorum is 33.3%). But this year, in 2019, we had five districts reach 100% or higher!

The districts representing all their clubs (and then some!) were:

• D111 (region 8, Brazil), got 104.3%, 24 proxies out of 23 paid clubs.
• D95 (region 10, Germany/Scandinavia), got 101.4%, 144 out of 142.
• D67 (region 14, Taiwan), 100%, 186 out of 186.
• D90 (region 12, New South Wales, Australia), 100%, 155 out of 155.
• D114 (region 11, east Africa), 100%, 51 out of 51.

At the other end of the scale, we had:

• D104 (region 11, western Saudi Arabia), 35.3%, 36 out of 102.
• D79 (region 11, eastern Saudi Arabia), 35.2%, 75 out of 213.
• D89 (region 14, Hong Kong, Macau, Fujian, Hainan and part of Guangdong), 30.4%, 41 out of 135.

The top quarter of districts beat 85% representation, the top half beat 74%, and the top 3/4 beat 62% (overall 2.7 percentage points higher than last year).

The top regions were:

• Region 12 (southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand), 82.0%
• Region 13 (India and southern Asia), 80.4%.

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 that’s why a district can 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 80-90% or more of the votes.

While there are many more important things for Toastmasters districts to devote scarce resources to (like helping struggling clubs and building new clubs), this 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-2019

Here’s my post on the 2018 proxy returns.