Once a year, nearly every public company whose stock you own — whether you bought it directly or hold it inside an index fund in your retirement account — holds an annual shareholder meeting. Directors get elected. The CEO's pay package gets approved. Mergers, climate resolutions, and questions about who gets paid what for the company to exist at all go to a vote. You're a part owner. You have a vote. And you've almost certainly never cast it, because someone else already cast it for you, without asking.
This isn't a metaphor or a conspiracy theory. It's literally how collective business ownership works today: a share carries a vote, but the vote can be delegated by proxy — and most shareholders delegate it without noticing, simply by buying a fund.
Who's actually voting your shares
If you hold shares directly — in a plain brokerage account, in your own name — you're the one who's supposed to vote. You get sent meeting materials (the proxy statement) and a ballot, usually routed through Broadridge, the largest infrastructure operator for shareholder voting in the US, via a site like proxyvote.com, by mail, or sometimes right inside your broker's app. Filling out the ballot takes about five minutes. Most retail holders don't do it: turnout among individual shareholders in proxy votes stays consistently low, and a notable share of retail holders never open the materials they're sent at all.
But most people don't hold shares this way. Their shares sit inside an index fund, an ETF, a pension plan — which means the fund legally owns the shares, not you personally. This is where the real mechanism kicks in, and almost nobody thinks about it: the vote isn't cast by you, and it isn't cast by "the fund" as an abstraction either. It's cast by the asset manager running the fund. A stewardship team of a few dozen people sets voting policy and, on behalf of millions of savers, votes on tens of thousands of questions across thousands of meetings every year.
Three firms — BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street — together manage trillions of dollars in index and ETF assets and, according to a body of academic research (notably Bebchuk and Hirst's paper "The Specter of the Giant Three"), rank as the largest or one of the largest shareholders in the overwhelming majority of S&P 500 companies. That means a small group of people in three offices effectively sets the voting will behind essentially all of American corporate power — and, through global funds, well beyond it. Your money is in there. Your voice isn't, unless you take it back.
Why this isn't a paperwork footnote
It's tempting to write off proxy voting as a formality for lawyers, not something a person trying to save for retirement should bother with. It isn't, and here's why.
The board hires and fires the CEO, approves their compensation package — sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars a year — decides whether profits go to buybacks, dividends, or real reinvestment, and approves or blocks takeovers. The annual meeting is the one moment in the year when an ordinary part-owner of a company can formally say "no" to the people running it, or to a specific decision. Every year, proxy votes also carry climate resolutions, lobbying-disclosure proposals, questions about labor conditions at supplier factories, and board composition — questions where the asset manager's interests (which earns its fee regardless of the outcome and would rather not pick a fight with a big client's management team) don't always line up with the interests of the actual saver whose money is at stake.
In other words: the proxy vote isn't a decorative feature of the word "shareholder." It's the single real lever of influence you have as a part-owner between the moment you buy a share and the moment you sell it. Handing it over by default means agreeing that decisions about where the capital behind your savings actually goes get made by someone you never chose and have never spoken to.
> Our record. In the ledger of Maat, a vote isn't decoration — it's the mechanism of fair distribution itself: whoever put capital in should have a say in where it goes, or the scale tips toward whoever happens to be standing in the middle of the flow. Silently handing your vote to a fund is a quiet form of Isfet: the right exists, nobody uses it, and power keeps pooling where it's already concentrated. That's why MAAT DAO is built from the start on direct token-holder voting rather than delegation to some invisible committee.
Two paths back to your own vote
The first path applies if your shares sit in an ordinary brokerage account in your own name. You're almost certainly already getting emails or in-app notifications about proxy votes — check whether they're landing in spam or a tab you never open. The major brokers (Schwab, Fidelity, Interactive Brokers, and others) let you vote right inside the app or through proxyvote.com in a few minutes: log in with the control number from the notice, mark your position on each item — for, against, abstain — and submit. Some services grew specifically out of the push to give retail holders back their voice — Say, for instance, now built into a number of brokerage platforms, collects shareholder questions for management and aggregates small holders' votes so they carry weight together instead of vanishing one at a time.
The second path applies if your shares sit inside a fund or ETF. Here you have no direct legal right to vote on a specific company inside the fund's portfolio — but in recent years, under pressure on exactly this question, the largest asset managers have started opening up partial "pass-through" voting. BlackRock has been expanding its Voting Choice program since 2022, letting holders in a number of funds pick from several voting policies or, for institutional and some individual investors, vote directly. Vanguard launched a pilot Investor Choice program in 2023 on a limited set of funds with the same idea. Neither is a blanket right for every saver to vote every position yet — the programs don't cover all funds and aren't uniformly available to individual investors — but the direction is unmistakable, and it's worth checking whether the option exists for your specific funds, usually through the asset manager's investor portal or a direct email to investor relations.
If that option isn't available yet, there's still a plainer, less convenient, but real alternative: gradually shift the part of your portfolio that matters most to you out of faceless index funds and into direct ownership of the individual companies you actually care about — precisely so the vote on them stays yours instead of dissolving into someone else's voting policy.
Do this today
Open your broker's app or your retirement plan's website and find the "proxy voting" section — it's usually tucked into account settings or the documents tab. Check two things: whether you're actually getting notified about upcoming shareholder meetings, and whether any of your funds offer a pass-through program like Voting Choice or Investor Choice. If you hold shares directly and there's an open vote on even one of them, cast it today, on whatever item you understand well enough to have an opinion on. Not because one vote will flip a board election, but because it's the first time you'll have used a right you've had all along — one that someone else has been quietly exercising for you.