This is what bothers me. What stops someone from shorting and then buying the shares (likely through an intermediary) in order to gain votes. Seems like it would be enough to tip the vote in a close shareholder vote. I don't think there is anything like a negative vote to balance it out as with negative shares and dividends.
It is very likely that the people who know they are casting a negative vote will vote strategically for the opposite of the thing they actually want to happen, thus turning their negative vote into an anti-negative vote.
I don't think that is resolvable unless each vote has an intrinsic auction process wherein each vote is accompanied by a dollar-valued bid, which is what it would cost for you to not vote your shares on that issue.
The costs are ordered, and the cost of the lowest N votes are sold to the N anti-shares of open short positions, and so each short pays 1/N of the total cost. Any vote not cast or cast-by-proxy or explicitly cast as "abstain" is intrinsically a $0 bid for not-voting that share.
So if there are 10000 real shares in circulation, and 4000 shadow shares, and 4000 shadow anti-shares, then 14000 shares are eligible to vote, but the shadow anti-share holders are also on the hook for collectively buying off the proxy for the 4000 least-interested shareholders, and not-voting those shares. If 2000 people don't vote or fail to assign their proxy, and the next-lowest 2000 bids amount to $80, then each short pays $0.02 per shorted share, and the brokers distribute that to all the low bidders, including those who didn't vote or assign proxy.
> What stops someone from shorting and then buying the shares (likely through an intermediary) in order to gain votes.
i don't think anything stops you, but you're going to eat the whole bid/ask spread when you're acquiring these extra shares, then again when you exit the position, plus margin maintenance costs. your plan also assumes that your broker will let you get out the entire proceeds of a unclosed short sale fast enough to get them over to another broker to buy more shares before the market can really move on you.
if your broker will even let you short whatever number of shares you want to do this with, they'll probably just lend you the cash to go long that many shares. which would be a lot easier.
