voting rights are certainly tracked - there absolutely are a known number of shares and owners of them. Now, because of trading activity, settlement, lending, failing-to-deliver those shares might not yet be recorded as belonging to the people who think they own them!
shorting does not create new shares in the accounts at the DTC - it does create hypothetical entries in the accounts of the broker's clients. The lender does not get a vote while their share is lent out! The last person in the chain of re-hypothecated shares will eventually (usually after 3 days) be the one true owner of the one true share and has the vote.
there are some special cases that ordinary investors will not encounter where you can actually split the voting rights from the other aspects of the share and lend the share out but keep the vote - but in this case, of course, the borrower can't vote. This sort of thing is administrated by the brokers - and is kind of like what happened in the article where the brokers sort it out among themselves how to reconcile the official record to the client's account states.
That article is really hard to find - no luck! It was written by Bob Drummond for Bloomberg Feb 27, 2006. He is still active and was writing a lot of articles on naked shorting at the time. fwiw
shorting does not create new shares in the accounts at the DTC - it does create hypothetical entries in the accounts of the broker's clients. The lender does not get a vote while their share is lent out! The last person in the chain of re-hypothecated shares will eventually (usually after 3 days) be the one true owner of the one true share and has the vote.
there are some special cases that ordinary investors will not encounter where you can actually split the voting rights from the other aspects of the share and lend the share out but keep the vote - but in this case, of course, the borrower can't vote. This sort of thing is administrated by the brokers - and is kind of like what happened in the article where the brokers sort it out among themselves how to reconcile the official record to the client's account states.