How democratic is the Rapp Electric Cooperative?
REC chairman defends recent board election process, closed meetings
More than 20,000 ballots were cast in this year’s Rappahannock Electric Cooperative director election on Aug. — 19 the most member-owner participation the coop has seen in any election since 1980, according to REC Chairman Chris Shipe. A record year, certainly, yet nearly a third (6,636) of those votes were — cast blank giving the Board of Directors the leverage to swing the election.
Electric Cooperatives, like REC, are democratic and member-owned, meaning that all ratepayers in a cooperative have equity in the company and get to vote for the company’s leadership. Member-owners vote one of two ways: they can show up to the annual meeting and cast their vote in person, or they can designate a proxy to vote on their behalf. That’s why the ballots in REC elections are generally called “proxies.”
This year, there was no voting in-person due to the pandemic. Member-owners could ll out their proxy forms online, making the proxy easier to ll out than ever before. But the proxy forms that the REC sent to its member-owners looked di erent this year: for the rst time, proxies bore the word “optional” above the section of the form asking for a candidate selection. And coupled with the nearly $10,000 in cash and merchandise prizes that the REC advertised member-owners could win if they designated a proxy, this practice casts some doubt on the health of REC’s democracy.
Last year, when the REC o ered $2,000 in prize value (compared with $9,600 in 2020), they received 6,661 votes compared with 20,008 in this year’s election. Of those, a little less than half (2,769) were blank.
But this year, the number of blank proxies exceeded the total number of proxies in 2019. “The sharp increase in blank proxies is attributable to the fact that a huge increase in prizes leads to more votes, including more votes by people who vote because of the prizes and are either uninformed about the issues or don’t care about the issues or both, and who thus leave part 3 of the form blank.” said Repower REC candidate Seth Heald, who lost the Region IV seat to incumbent Sanford Reaves.
But REC Board Chair Chris Shipe rejected the notion that the increase in prizes led to an increase in votes, claiming that the reason more people voted this year was because they allowed people to vote online for the rst time.
“We’ve been doing the door prizes over the last couple of years and it didn’t move the needle,” Shipe said. “The reason it moved the needle this year is that … we took full advantage of the internet.”
“It almost seems to me that we’re not giving our members enough credit that they can read [the proxy],” Shipe continued.
“What a blank proxy tells me is that the member feels that, ok, the Board is doing a good job, the company is doing well, so we’re not going to take the time to nd the information or we don’t want to engage the information, we’re just going to allow the board to proceed as-is.”
And when asked about why the word “optional” appeared on the proxy form this year, Shipe said it was to “clarify … it’s optional to vote for speci c candidates.”
Notably, in the only contested election this year, incumbent Sanford Reaves won 14,087 votes (including all but 3 of the 6,636 blank proxies) compared with Seth Heald’s 5,921. Excluding blank proxies, Reaves won by a much narrower (but still signi cant) 1,530vote margin.
As for what the directors do once elected to the Board, counter to the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) best practices, the REC holds all of its regular meetings behind closed doors and does not (yet) make its meeting minutes public.
“We need to make sure that the members know where the Board’s head is,” Shipe conceded, adding that he was open to the idea of publishing the Board’s meeting minutes on REC’s website.
“The issue with total open meetings is theatrics … I want members to know what we’re doing, but I also … say inarticulate things sometimes. Sometimes we have devil’s advocate arguments whereas somebody gets kind of spun up about something, and that doesn’t look too good in the public to be honest with you.”
Shipe defends the REC as being nevertheless democratic “in that we [directors] are all accessible and every decision we make certainly passes what I call the red-face test, meaning, can we defend what we’re doing and how we’re doing it? Absolutely.”