I'm pretty sure that's not true. Firstly the article you quote is 7 years old and you cannot assume the corporate governance has not changed for NRL clubs in this time.
Secondly, I am pretty sure that St George operate roughly the same as Tigers do - you need to be voted to the Leagues Club Boards first (Dragons and Steelers) before then politicking your way onto the SGeorge Illawarra Dragons Football Club board.
And for Manly, their private owners self-appoint the majority hold of the Manly board, meaning the vote-able seats available on the board are an intentional minority. In other words, you cannot over-rule the Penns, because the Penns control the board.
The other issue with what you raise is that the primary reason the Wests Tigers are not set up like some of the other Sydney clubs is because we are technically a much newer club than most of them. Clubs like Eels and Bulldogs are developed from an original Leagues Club licence with the NSWRL, same as Balmain were, so any club that has not had an internal revolution or merged is still operating under roughly the same old model.
Clubs that have had a revolution, e.g. private ownership like Souths or Knights, now have widely varied voting models.
So it's not true that WT are the only Sydney club that does not give members a say - many of the Sydney clubs are set up in such a way that if voting rights exist, they are still intentionally kept to a minority, so that the board cannot be toppled by popular vote. This is true of Dragons, Manly, Souths; I'm not sure now on the Panthers and Sharks.
Eels and Bulldogs retain the classic member-vote-board setup from the NSWRL days, and with all due respect, they are certainly some of the most dysfunctional setups going. All that Eels nonsense with Paul Osborne being sacked a few years back, then the sponsorship salary cap issue; the years-long efforts of Dennis Fitzgerald to retain his iron grip on the Eels and Leagues Club.
And then the Bulldogs, going through several board-level turnovers, and Lynn Anderson had to quietly step aside herself in recent years, despite waging a public and ultimately successful campaign to overturn the old Bulldogs Board. And that has no small part to play in the struggles the Bulldogs have experienced for the past half-decade.
So whilst I do support your notion that members should have more voting rights, it's not true that Wests are some kind of archaic or unusual outlier. It's not a democracy and most club boards are strong-armed by wealthy or powerful persons/factions.
You do officially have a mechanism to get votes onto the Wests Tigers board. You need to, same as Dragons, run for the Wests Ashfield Board (which you can do as a Wests member), then politick your way from the WA Board onto Tigers. It is possible.
