Target 16.6: Effective, accountable, transparent institutions

NLPC's proposal asked Comcast to separate the roles of CEO and board chair and appoint an independent chair, arguing that combining the roles under CEO Brian Roberts, who also controls a supermajority of votes through Class B shares, weakens board oversight.

Result: Received about 42.73% support among Class A shares at the June 2026 annual meeting.

we found no documented change; Comcast's dual-class structure means Class B shares (about one-third of total voting power, held by the Roberts family) can outweigh Class A shareholder sentiment regardless of the Class A vote share.

Comcast Class A Shareholders Reject $107M Co-CEO Pay as Stock Slid 20%, National Legal and Policy Center

The proposal asked Elevance's board to commission an independent study on adopting a policy against corporate contributions to partisan 527 political organizations, after the company gave more than $9.7 million to the Republican Governors Association and $1.3 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association since 2010.

Result: Received about 8.7% support at the May 2026 annual meeting.

we found no documented change; Trillium described this first-year result as a basis for continued engagement.

Q2 2026 Shareholder Advocacy Impact Report, Trillium Asset Management

The proposal asked JPMorgan to report on whether its lobbying and public-policy advocacy align with the company's own stated public-policy positions.

Result: A similar proposal received 31.6% support at the 2023 annual meeting; support fell to 13.2% at the 2026 annual meeting.

we found no documented change to JPMorgan's lobbying disclosure practices as a result of these votes.

JPMorgan shareholders reject call for more lobbying disclosures, American Banker

Asked Netflix shareholders to vote against the re-election of every member of the Netflix board. Bowyer Research gave two reasons, the board's oversight of five years of share price performance that the firm said trailed competitors, and the firm's objections to some of the company's content decisions.

Result: Bowyer Research urged shareholders to vote against the whole board at the June 5, 2025 annual meeting. Director Jay Hoag received 71,428,414 votes for and 259,865,864 against, failing the company's majority voting standard, and tendered his resignation. The company's Form 8-K records both the vote and the resignation offer.

We found no documented change at Netflix that any source we retrieved attributes to this campaign. No source we retrieved links the vote against Jay Hoag to Bowyer Research's solicitation, and the campaign asked shareholders to vote against the whole board rather than against him in particular.

Notice of Exempt Solicitation, Netflix, Inc., filed by Bowyer Research urging a vote against the board of directors, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, EDGAR

NLPC petitioned Comcast's board to adopt a policy requiring director candidates to disclose their personal charitable and political campaign contributions.

Result: Comcast successfully petitioned the SEC to exclude the proposal from its proxy statement; no shareholder vote occurred.

NLPC compiled and published campaign-contribution data on Comcast's director nominees itself, drawn from FEC records, in a proxy memo opposing all 10 director nominees; we found no documented change by Comcast to its own disclosure practices.

Comcast Directors Refuse to Disclose Political Donations, So Shareholder Does It for Them, Yahoo Finance

The resolution asked AT&T to publicly disclose how its political contributions align with the company's own stated public-policy priorities and sustainability goals.

Result: Withdrawn after AT&T agreed to As You Sow's request.

AT&T committed to publish data on how its political spending aligns with its stated positions. We could not confirm that this data has since appeared in the company's published political engagement reporting.

AT&T Commits to Political Spending Transparency for Shareholders and Customers, As You Sow, 2023-12-06

The CPA-Zicklin Index scores companies on whether they disclose political spending, how they set internal rules on political contributions, and whether the board oversees that spending.

Result: The 2022 edition was the first to cover the full Russell 1000; 78% of S&P 500 companies fully or partially disclosed political spending or restricted at least one type of spending, and the average S&P 500 score rose 3% year over year.

More than half of S&P 500 companies had board-level oversight of political spending by 2022, according to the source, reflecting a trend of rising disclosure scores over the decade the index has run (since 2012).

Corporate Political Disclosure Rankings Show 'Dramatic Gap' in Transparency Between Largest and Smaller Companies, Ballard Spahr LLP

Engine No. 1, an activist investor holding about 0.02% of Exxon's shares, nominated an independent slate of board candidates and asked shareholders to replace directors with people who had experience managing a profitable transition in the energy industry, arguing the existing board lacked the expertise and independence to manage climate-related business risk and to spend capital with discipline.

Result: Engine No. 1's nominees won 3 of ExxonMobil's 12 board seats (Gregory Goff, Kaisa Hietala, and Alexander Karsner), per ExxonMobil's own June 2, 2021 announcement of preliminary results. Major pension funds including CalPERS, CalSTRS, and the New York State Common Retirement Fund backed the dissident slate.

One year on, ExxonMobil increased Scope 3 emissions disclosure, set more ambitious Scope 1 and 2 targets, shifted from a planned 25% production growth to holding production steady, and added board members with energy-transition experience; Engine No. 1's own team characterized the underlying long-term business strategy, continued heavy spending on new fossil fuel projects (about $30-35 billion a year), and lobbying posture as largely unchanged.

Engine No. 1 wins at least 2 Exxon board seats as activist pushes for climate strategy change, CNBC

The Teamsters asked shareholders to vote against McKesson's executive pay package, arguing the company had not held leadership accountable for its role in distributing opioids, and separately pushed to split the CEO and board-chair roles.

Result: McKesson's executive pay package received only 26.6 percent shareholder support in the 2018 vote, described at the time as one of the worst results among S&P 500 companies. This was a vote-no campaign against a management-sponsored say-on-pay proposal, not a shareholder-filed resolution.

McKesson cut CEO John Hammergren's total pay by about $1.95 million (roughly 10 percent) and said it would factor opioid-related compliance risk into future pay decisions; in 2021, after an $8.1 billion opioid settlement, the board also imposed a further $2.9 million discretionary reduction to CEO Brian Tyler's pay and cut a former CEO's payments by $780,000.

McKesson Reduces CEO's Pay 10% Following Revolt by Investors, Teamsters (International Brotherhood of Teamsters)

The coalition asked opioid distributors and manufacturers to strengthen board oversight of opioid-related risk, review whether executive bonuses were tied to opioid sales volume, and add clawback policies so pay could be taken back after misconduct.

With Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility members, state and city pension funds, Catholic and other faith-based investors

Result: As of October 15, 2018, one year into the campaign, the coalition had submitted 35 resolutions at 11 public companies, of which 10 had received shareholder votes, including majority votes among independent voters at Assertio Therapeutics (formerly Depomed) and AmerisourceBergen, per National Catholic Reporter. The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility's later retrospective gives a wider total of 20 companies engaged, reports that a majority of shareholder proposals, 52%, led to agreements with the companies rather than a vote, and counts seven resolutions winning majority votes at Rite Aid, Walgreens, Mallinckrodt, Mylan and Assertio Therapeutics plus two more winning majority support at AmerisourceBergen. The coalition's resolutions were filed across the 2017 to 2019 proxy seasons, and SHARE's account of the full run to 2023 describes more than 100 proposals.

Twelve of the companies engaged conducted opioid-related risk assessments, ten adopted misconduct clawback policies, and three separated the chair and CEO roles, those three being McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen, according to the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility's account of the coalition's tally.

To stem opioid crisis, investment coalition pressures supply chain, National Catholic Reporter

Investors called on the Wells Fargo board to claw back pay from executives responsible for the bank's fake-accounts scandal and used the annual director election to signal accountability for oversight failures.

Result: Four of Wells Fargo's 15 directors, including then-chairman Stephen Sanger, received less than 60% shareholder support at the April 2017 annual meeting, far below the roughly 95% typical for uncontested directors. Mechanism: a vote-no / withhold campaign in the annual director election.

All twelve nominated directors were re-elected, several with unusually low support. We found no documented board change attributable to this vote. The board's clawback of pay from John Stumpf and Carrie Tolstedt happened in September 2016, seven months earlier, and was not a result of this vote.

Statement From NYC Comptroller Stringer on Wells Fargo's Board of Director Election, Office of the New York City Comptroller

The proposal asked Alphabet to recapitalize its share structure so that every share carries one vote, ending the dual-class structure that gives founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin outsized control.

With Boston Common Asset Management

Result: About 99.8% of Class A (non-founder) shares voted in favor, but because founder-controlled Class B super-voting shares are counted together with Class A shares, overall support was about 28.9%.

we found no documented change; Alphabet's dual-class structure remained in place because founders Page and Brin controlled over 51% of the vote while holding only about 11% of shares.

Alphabet Shareholders Overwhelmingly Support Equal Voting, CorpGov.net

The campaign asked companies to adopt 'proxy access' bylaws letting a group of shareholders who together have owned at least 3% of the company's stock for three or more years nominate up to 25% of the board directly on the company's own proxy ballot.

Result: Proxy access proposals won majority support at several target companies (for example, 71% at Netflix and 49.9% at Chipotle in 2015); by 2016, 50 of the 72 companies targeted that year had agreed to adopt proxy access.

Multiple companies adopted proxy access bylaws as a direct result of the campaign, according to the source, though Netflix's board did not implement proxy access despite the 71% vote in its favor in 2015.

Comptroller Stringer, NYC Funds: Boardroom Accountability Enters Next Phase As Campaign Achieves Critical Mass, Office of the New York City Comptroller