Recent events in American history underscore the need for a highly engaged electorate and fair voting systems to support a well-functioning democracy and economy. One of the hurdles to participating in democracy is that Americans lack guaranteed time to vote, often causing a conflict between voters’ work schedules and their desire to go to the polls.
In 2022, Trillium, continuing outreach that began in 2019, wrote to and spoke with the companies held in our Large Cap Core strategy to assess their paid time off to vote policies and encouraged uptake for companies that lacked them. Positively, 45% of the companies that responded to our outreach offer some form of paid time off to vote, many of which started offering the benefit ahead of the 2020 election. However, there are still many companies that follow a compliance approach and do not offer material support for employees to vote. With the 2022 midterm elections coming up, we encourage companies and investors to prioritize voting rights as a key issue.
