Apparently the proxy system, especially proxies voted electronically are useless.  This explains why Broadridge won't return my calls.

Quote:

---

Some of the financial intermediaries' clients will have given approval for their shares to be lent by the broker-dealer. If a share is lent, it is presumably filling a short position.5 The long party will have bought both the cash ow rights and the voting rights. The original owners lose their voting rights. 6 If an institution matches shares on loan to underlying client accounts before mailing voting materials (known as pre-mailing reconciliation), over-voting is unlikely to occur with sucient frequency to impact election outcomes. However, because it is costly for the broker-dealer to link the lent share to a particular client account, many broker-dealers distribute proxy materials to all owners without using reconciling outstanding loan positions to particular clients. These institutions practice \post-mailing reconciliation" whereby loan positions are reconciled only if the institution receives more VIFs than what is indicated by their DTC account.7 Institutions are currently not required to disclose their reconciliation method; however the results of this study and the following quote from Broadridge suggest most institutions participate in the post-mailing reconciliation.

---

http://www.stern.nyu.edu/cons/groups/content/...034305.pdf