By Justin Lee, theWHIR.com
August 6, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Search engine provider Yahoo! (yahoo.com) reported on Wednesday that the shareholder votes were miscounted at last week’s general meeting.
The tallying error was made by Broadridge Financial Services, which acts as an alternate for institutional shareholders. The service provider blamed “a truncation error [which] occurred in reporting share numbers that exceeded eight digits”.
Once recounted, the voting results saw a slight decline in the popularity of Yahoo! boss Jerry Yang as well as the majority of the board.
The corrected figures showed Yang pulling in 66.3 percent of the votes in his favor, compared to the original results of 85.4 percent. Similarly, votes in favor for Yahoo! chairman Roy Bostock were just 60.4 percent compared to 79.5 percent.
The full results can be viewed in the client shareholders section of Yahoo!’s website.
Despite the miscount, the majority of shareholders still voted in favor of Yang and the board. As a result, Yang will continue to lead and the board will go unchanged.
Last month, Yahoo! rejected a bid from Microsoft and billionaire investor Carl Icahn, which proposed that Microsoft would takeover Yahoo!’s search business, while Icahn and his new team operate the rest of the business.
Icahn had long been petitioning for the replacement of Yang and many individuals on the company’s board of directors.
