Upcoming votes from Florida’s pension fund

I’m proud to announce that ProxyDemocracy now features upcoming votes from the Florida State Board of Administration (link to PD profile), which administers the fourth largest state pension fund. Two things make this particularly exciting news.

First, up until now everything we’ve done has involved taking existing data and organizing it, but in this case we’ve helped to create new data. The other disclosers we’ve worked with so far — CalPERS, CBIS, Domini, and Calvert — all have been disclosing their votes in advance of meetings since at least the early 2000s, and were in fact a big part of the inspiration for building PD. Florida has been active in corporate governance issues for a long time now, but until a few weeks ago they were not disclosing votes in advance of meetings. Earlier this summer they contacted us, worked with RiskMetrics to get their votes disclosed on their own website, and worked with us to make sure those votes could be published on PD. We hope others follow suit! (In fact, one more has — I’ll announce that in a few days.)

The other exciting thing is that Florida discloses a LOT of votes — on well over 3000 companies. This means that there will be more and more meetings where we will have advance votes to publish, and more where we will have perspectives from more than one voter.

Florida has also taken the initiative in disclosing its voting policy in detail on RiskMetrics’ new “Policy Exchange” (link to Florida’s policy — free registration required), which provides a very detailed explanation of their voting policies. Useful to shareholders who are considering following Florida’s lead on upcoming meetings!