Although Broc Romanek recently reported that so far this year 43 companies have failed to achieve majority support for “say-on-pay”, the reality is that this is a miniscule percentage of the total number of publicly traded companies.

Moreover, even failure can be a matter of perspective. In one of the recent cases cited by Broc, the company, Hemispherx Biopharma, Inc., reported that “44.1% of the votes cast were in favor of executive compensation, while 37.0% of the votes cast were against and 18.9% of the votes cast abstained”. (This wording is more than a bit odd because an abstention is by definition a vote not cast. Based on the company’s proxy card, I think it would be more accurate to say that 18.9% of the proxies returned were marked with instructions that the proxy holder abstain from voting. See “A Proxy Is Not A Vote And Why It Matters“.)