(FORTUNE Magazine) – Good news for investors with inquiring minds: In response to a new SEC regulation, mutual funds for the first time are disclosing how they voted on proxies at the companies in their portfolios over the past year. The rule, proposed by much-criticized former SEC chairman Harvey Pitt and adopted last year, requires each fund to file its complete proxy voting record with the SEC every Aug. 31 and make it available to shareholders upon request. (For more, see Geoffrey Colvin's column in this issue.)

Many firms are making their records available over their websites. The quickest way to find your fund's voting record is typically by searching the firm's website using the keywords "proxy voting." Fund giant Fidelity lists all its funds alphabetically; after clicking on your fund, you then have to click on the company you want before you can see the voting record. Vanguard simply posts each fund's SEC filing, showing how it voted at all the companies in its portfolio.

Take a close look at this year's headline-grabbing proxy battles, and it's not hard to see why the fund industry so vehemently opposed the regulation: The voting within fund families isn't always consistent. At Fidelity, for example, the Magellan fund voted against expensing stock options at eBay and Intel and opposed separating the chairman and chief executive jobs at Coca-Cola. But the company's Spartan 500 Index fund voted in favor of all of these proposals.

A Fidelity spokesman says its index funds are managed by Goede Capital Management, which may vote its shares differently from Fidelity. It's not an uncommon arrangement in the industry, which troubles some watchdogs. "Investors should expect consistency," says William Patterson, director of the AFL-CIO's office of investment. Otherwise, fund managers are canceling out each other's votes.

Stay tuned for more revelations. Groups that pushed for mandatory disclosure are combing over the votes and will soon issue reports. Says Patterson: "We want to see what's going on across the board." --David Stires