What is Common-Law Voting?
Common-law voting is a practice in which each shareholder is granted one vote during an election process. Within the structure for common law voting, the number of shares held by a given shareholder is not taken into consideration. Shareholders with hundreds of shares in their possession will have no more voting rights within the process than a shareholder who is in possession of a single share. The actual usage of common-law voting among corporations is very rare. Proponents of the approach tend to point out that common-law voting makes the process of holding an election very simplistic. If a corporation currently has fifty shareholders, there are only fifty votes to be counted. This is in contrast to situations where the number of votes per shareholder is determined by the number of shares currently held. In this scenario, it is necessary to verify the number of shares held by each shareholder as of a certain date. Based on factors outlined in the bylaws of the company, it is then ne
