Unbelievably, the firm which counted shareholder votes for Yahoo omitted tens of millions of shares voted by dissident shareholder Capital Research & Management — and badly skewed the result. Yahoo calls it a " tabulation error ." If you can call shifting 200 million votes from the "no" column to the "yes column", then sure. Call it whatever — it's actually Jerry Yang 's death knell. The corrected total more than doubles the percentage of shareholders who withheld their votes from Yang, from 14.6 percent to 33.7 percent. Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock went from 20.5 percent withheld to 39.5 percent. At those levels of withheld votes, there is ample precedent for them to step down. Michael Eisner stepped down as Disney's chairman after having 43 percent of the votes withheld ; Steve Case left Time Warner's board amid a shareholder revolt, and still drew a 22 percent protest. With the correct numbers in, Yang and Bostock's position has changed from comfortable to perilous — showing that votes count in business as well as in politics. ...
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Unbelievably, the firm which counted shareholder votes for Yahoo omitted tens of millions of shares voted by dissident shareholder Capital Research & Management — and badly skewed the result. Yahoo calls it a " tabulation error ." If you can call shifting 200 million votes from the "no" column to the "yes column", then sure. Call it whatever — it's actually Jerry Yang 's death knell. The corrected total more than doubles the percentage of shareholders who withheld their votes from Yang, from 14.6 percent to 33.7 percent. Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock went from 20.5 percent withheld to 39.5 percent. At those levels of withheld votes, there is ample precedent for them to step down. Michael Eisner stepped down as Disney's chairman after having 43 percent of the votes withheld ; Steve Case left Time Warner's board amid a shareholder revolt, and still drew a 22 percent protest. With the correct numbers in, Yang and Bostock's position has changed from comfortable to perilous — showing that votes count in business as well as in politics. ...