The annual Toastmasters business meeting is where we elect the board of directors, international officers, and amend our governing documents.

Clubs not assigned to a district are assigned to a district director as a proxy option, and so it is possible for districts to get more than 100% of “their” proxies for the business meeting. None did that this year. The percent of clubs represented has varied from 73.5% in 2019, to 66.1% last year, to 70.0% this year (quorum is one-third).

The districts with the best percentage of club proxies were:

• D70 (Southern Sydney, southern NSW and ACT, Australia), got 95.7%, 134 proxies out of 140 paid clubs (missing 6 clubs).
• D65 (Western and central New York), got 95.2%, 60 out of 63.
• D90 (Northern Sydney, Australia), 95.0%, 119 out of 126.
• D116 (Qatar), 93.5%, 115 out of 123.
• D120 (Tamil Nadu, India), 92.9%, 144 out of 155.

At the other end of the scale, we had:

• D79 (Eastern Saudi Arabia), 12.2%, 18 out of 147.
• D89 (Hong Kong, Macau, Fujian, Hainan and part of Guangdong, China), 24.7%, 23 out of 93.
• D73 (South Australia, Victoria, and Tasmania, Australia), 38.3%, 46 out of 120.

The top quarter of districts beat 82% representation, the top half beat 70%, and the top 3/4 beat 59%.

The top regions were:

• Region 13 (southern Asia, India to Singapore), 77.1%
• Region 8 (Southeastern US, Caribbean, Brazil), 76.1%.

The vast majority of the votes come from clubs (98.8%, 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 votes cannot be assigned to someone else (unlike clubs).

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.

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 project!

Full details in the Excel spreadsheet here: Proxies-2023

Here’s my post on the 2022 proxy returns.