Activist: Yahoo! Vote Doesn't Add Up

2007 Results

According to Yahoo!'s second-quarter 2007 10-Q, which was filed in August 2007, Roy Bostock received 828,803,221 shares voting "for" and 376,632,150 shares voting "against" out of a total 1,205,435,371. That means he received 68.8% of votes "for" his re-election and 31.2% of votes "against" his re-election.

However, it's notable that 159,339,787 fewer votes were cast this year compared to last year's vote on Roy Bostock.

It seems odd that fewer (13.2% fewer) shares would be voted this year compared to last, when there's been such additional scrutiny on the company in the wake of management's dealings with Microsoft and Carl Icahn. With the additional press, you would expect there would be more shares voted this year compared to last.

If you assume those 160 million shares were voted for Icahn and would have been voted against Bostock's re-election, he would have received 632,023,657 "for" votes and 573,411,714 "withhold" or "against" votes for a total of 1,205,435,371. This means that, this year, he would have received 52.4% of votes "for" his re-election and 47.6% of votes "against" his re-election -- just barely avoiding a vote of non-confidence.

2006 Results

If you go back to the second-quarter 10-Q from August 2006, you see that Roy Bostock received 1,261,316,357 shares voting "for" and 14,859,244 shares voting "withheld" out of a total 1,276,175,601 shares. That means, in that year, he received 98.8% of votes "for" his re-election and 1.2% of votes "against" his re-election.

But, again, there were 230,080,017 fewer votes (18% fewer) cast this year compared to this 2006 vote on Roy Bostock.