Yahoo!'s Latest Goof: Miscounting Proxy Votes

You'd have thought the Yahoo! soap opera was over, but no ... they apparently can't even count votes right. Or at least, Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc., the company entrusted with counting the shareholder meeting votes, can't.

Apparently they were using Lotus 1-2-3 instead of Microsoft Excel. Seriously, when Broadridge reported voting results for “withholds”, a truncation error occurred in reporting share numbers that exceeded eight digits.

So, the results as reported originally:


The corrected results:


Seems like all the directors are just a tad bit less popular than was thought.

Broadridge investigated Monday at the request of Capital Research Global Investors, a steadfast critic of Yahoo!'s failure to deal with Microsoft (and owner of 6% of Yahoo!'s shares), which suspected that the number of withheld votes ought to have been higher.

This isn't the first such error in shareholder history, but based on how farcical and drawn-out the Yahoo! soap opera has become, it's particularly appropriate.