When you buy shares, you buy the rules of the company you are buying. Some have rules that allow anybody to put something on a ballot (not many -- remember, if one shareholder has the "right", so do the other 1 million shareholders, so you could have 1 million propositions.
Or, the rules may say "you have to have 1% (or 2 or 5 or 10) to get on a ballot." If the corporate charter and rules say that, those rules govern, the SEC isn't taking anything away.
What the headline means is that the SEC is limiting HOW MUCH IT (IT) will override company rules that you agreed to when you bought the stock.
Puts a little different perspective on it, no?
To do political damage, a decision like this doesn't have to be wrong; it just has to appear wrong. That's the point I was making...