If you own an index fund, you own slivers of several thousand companies, and every one of those slivers carries a vote. Somebody casts those votes every spring, at annual meetings you will never attend, on questions that range from who sits on the board to how much the chief executive is paid. In this week’s essay I looked at who that somebody actually is: a team of about sixty people at the largest fund manager, voting at more than twelve thousand companies a year by written guideline.
This post is the practical half. In the last few years the big fund managers have built programs that let you choose the policy your shares are voted under, and as of this year you can enroll in the largest of them in about ten minutes. Here is how to find out who votes your shares now, whether your funds qualify, what the choices actually mean, and how to decide whether it is worth your time.
Step one: find out who votes your shares now
The default arrangement is simple. Your fund holds the shares, so your fund holds the votes, and the manager’s stewardship team casts them according to published voting guidelines. You do not need anyone’s permission to see how this has been going. The big managers disclose every vote they cast. BlackRock publishes its record through a searchable vote disclosure tool, Vanguard publishes annual and quarterly stewardship reports listing votes and company engagements, and the other large managers follow similar practice. Ten minutes with your own fund list and the manager’s stewardship page will tell you exactly how your money has been voting, and for most people that is an unfamiliar and slightly strange discovery: a voting record, in your name, that you have never seen.
Step two: check whether your funds qualify for a choice program
Pass-through voting programs let you direct how your proportional slice of the fund’s shares is voted. Coverage is expanding quickly, but it is not universal, so the first question is whether your specific funds are in.
| Program | Who it serves | Where it stands in 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Vanguard Investor Choice | Individual investors, advisors, 529 plans, and retirement plan sponsors | 32 equity index funds including the flagship 500 Index Fund, roughly 22 million eligible investors, with a stated commitment to cover every U.S. equity index fund by the end of 2027 |
| BlackRock Voting Choice | Mostly institutional clients, plus a retail program for the firm’s largest iShares ETF | About 3.76 trillion dollars of the firm’s 7.7 trillion in index equity assets is eligible |
| Other managers | Varies by firm and account type | Programs exist and are growing; ask your fund provider or plan sponsor directly whether pass-through voting is offered on your holdings |
Step three: understand what is actually on the menu
Here is the part most coverage skips. Choosing does not mean you start receiving ballots. It means you pick one standing policy from a short curated menu, and your slice of the shares is voted under that policy at every company, all season, automatically. The options differ slightly by program and they evolve, but they fall into five recognizable types: the manager’s own default policy, a policy that votes with company boards, third-party policies written by proxy advisors (Vanguard’s menu has included a Glass Lewis ESG option and a wealth-focused option), a mirror policy that votes your shares in proportion to how other shareholders vote, and the option not to vote at all. Read the one-page descriptions before choosing; each policy states plainly what it favors on the questions that recur, such as director elections, executive pay, and shareholder proposals.
Step four: enroll
If you hold Vanguard index funds directly in a Vanguard brokerage account, log in, open the Investor Choice page, and select a policy. The selection is one-time, it applies to your participating funds, and it carries forward automatically as new funds join the program. If you hold Vanguard funds through another brokerage, the program was integrated into ProxyVote.com in March of this year, so you can make the same selection on the platform where individual share ballots already arrive. If your index funds sit inside a workplace retirement plan, the decision currently belongs to your plan sponsor, so the practical step is a short note to whoever administers the plan asking whether they have considered enrolling. And if you find the whole apparatus improbably frictionless now, you are not wrong: as of April you can begin enrollment by voice command through Alexa. The barrier has never been lower, which makes the participation numbers in the next section worth sitting with.
Step five: decide whether it is worth doing
Honesty requires the numbers. In the 2025 proxy season, just over 80,000 of roughly ten million eligible Vanguard investors selected a policy, which is somewhat less than one percent, and that was a year in which participation doubled. The economics explain the reluctance: your stake in any single company is a few dollars, so studying governance company by company will never pay you back, and the programs quietly acknowledge this by offering templates rather than ballots. Choosing a policy will not make you a governance force, and it will not let you vote against one particular pay package at one particular firm.
What it does do is modest and real. It moves your slice of the largest pool of corporate voting power in history from a default you never examined to a policy you actually read and picked, and it costs ten minutes once. If you have ever had an opinion about how the companies you own are run, this is the one lever that exists at household scale. Take the ten minutes, or decline them knowingly. Either is defensible; only the unexamined default is not a decision at all.
The ten-minute version. List your index funds. Open your fund provider’s voting choice page and check eligibility. Read the short policy descriptions and pick the one nearest your view. Confirm the selection applied to your account. Done once, it persists, and you can change it later.
The full essay behind this guide, on the sixty people, the season, and what the participation experiments have revealed, is on Time’s Mirror this week.
