[maest]

They legally have to vote their shares.

Individuals are exempt for that.

It's interesting to think about index fund providers incentives:

(1) track the market (2) do it very cheaply

Voting shares is a cost center with no benefit towards the business. Fund providers don't want to spend time and money to do research on individual proposals, that would be too expensive. So they do the cheapest thing possible and default to following corporate recs.

(That's actually a simplification, what happens in practice is, they use third party proxy voting advisors, but the end results is mostly the same, except that they vote down really egregious proposals, e.g. crazy CEO pay in the context of a free falling share price)

[mushufasa]

Why not simply allow their beneficial owners to vote on what they should do?

I've building a startup for that -- you can support petitions like https://www.yourstake.org/ask/vanguard-demand-companies-disc...

[mikeash]

Can they vote half of their shares yes and half no?