Bloomberg, October 21, 2025, article: "Vanguard Adds $1.4 Trillion S&P Funds to Investor Proxy Program" [Progress of "pass-through" shareholder voting]

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Progress of "pass-through" shareholder voting

A Vanguard report of its progress and plans for the "Investor Choice" program addressed in the article below can downloaded here.

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Source: Bloomberg, October 21, 2025, article

Bloomberg

Markets

Vanguard Adds $1.4 Trillion S&P Funds to Investor Proxy Program

By Katie Greifeld

October 21, 2025 at 9:00 AM EDT

Vanguard Group is expanding its proxy voting program — designed to give shareholders a greater say on corporate resolutions at portfolio companies — to add the investment giant’s oldest index fund.

Both the mutual fund and exchange-traded fund share classes of the Vanguard 500 Index Fund are set to be part of the firm’s Investor Choice program in 2026, according to a press release Tuesday. That includes the $645 billion Vanguard 500 Index Fund (ticker VFIAX) and the $769 billion Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO), which ranks as the world’s largest ETF.

With the additions, Vanguard’s Investor Choice program now spans more than half of the Valley Forge, Pennsylvania-based firm’s roughly $6 trillion in US equity index assets. Vanguard, which owns a stake in virtually every US-listed public company through its stable of index funds, launched the program in 2023 as an avenue for individual investors to indicate how they’d like Vanguard to vote during companies’ proxy ballots. Peers like BlackRock Inc. and State Street Corp. have similar initiatives.

The fund managers have been scrutinized by investors and politicians in Republican-led states over their big sway over companies and for promoting so-called liberal topics like climate change. Last week, Glass Lewis & Co. — which provides voting advice to large investment firms and has faced criticism from Republican leaders for supporting pro-environmental, social and governance issues — said it’s ending its decades-long practice of providing benchmark recommendations for shareholder votes. Institutional Shareholder Services, its biggest rival, said it will give its advice for investors who want it.

In addition to the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, share classes of the Vanguard Extended Market Index Fund and the Vanguard Institutional Index Fund will also be added in 2026, the release said — doubling the number of eligible investors to roughly 20 million. More than 80,000 investors in Vanguard’s Investor Choice program made a policy selection during the 2025 proxy season.

“Central to Vanguard Investor Choice is the core belief that investors should have the option to express a preference for how their index-fund holdings vote,” John Galloway, Vanguard’s global head of investment stewardship, said in the release.

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