How can all shareholders attend the general meeting

Question

As far as I understood every person who owns a stock can join the general meeting and vote about the company. How is that if somebody bought a single stock online? Apple has 15 billion shares. Even if every shareholder owned 1 million shares that would still be 15k people. How are they going to count who owns what?

edit: my question is not how they can house 15k people. i am asking how they can count the votes and make sure you bought a vote. if you bought some shares on a random trading site like [capital.com](http://capital.com) or robinhood how are you going to prove that you actually bought it? is there a vote button on robinhood?

In: Economics

Answer 1

For big public companies a lot of shares do not come with voting rights. This is a way to make general meetings go much faster. Even those shares that do have voting power is often delegated so fewer shareholders attend these meetings then actually own stock. Apple used to hold shareholder meetings in their auditorium which houses 1000 people. But even bigger venues have been used by other companies to get all shareholders under one roof. It is now very common to hold meetings virtually.

As for counting votes and such this can be an issue, but there is usually not many votes in each meeting. Some of the more simple votes are done equally simple. For example just have people say yes or no or to raise a hand. It is pretty obvious which way the vote is going and if there is any doubt they call for a proper vote, or just discuss the issues which are likely minor. When you need to count votes it is actually quite easy if you have a system for it. Each shareholder gives their vote to one of the counters, who then multiplies this with the number of shares each control, and then these numbers are added together at the end. With a team of vote counters you may easily count all 1000 votes in less then 15 minutes manually. And each vote may be a ballot of different things to vote on. So you have a recess with refreshments being served while the votes get counted, usually only once in the meeting but sometimes twice. And of course this can also be done digitally. It can be as easy as just sharing a spreadsheet with all shareholders, this can easily be audited by anyone with access to it.