Activist: Yahoo! Vote Doesn't Add Up

If you assume these missing shares would have been voted against Bostock's re-election, he would have received 632,023,657 "for" votes and 644,151,944 "withhold" or "against" votes for a total of 1,276,175,601 (and keep in mind that Friday's press release from Yahoo! said there were 1,381,008,701 shares outstanding as of the record date, June 3, 2008). This means that, this year, Bostock would have received 49.5% of votes "for" his re-election and 50.5% of votes "against" his re-election -- a flat rejection.

You could also make the argument that every possible vote that was going to be cast "for" Bostock's election was counted in Yahoo!'s number of 632,023,657 for this year. That means there were 748,985,044 shares (or 54.2%) out of the total 1,381,008,701 which did not vote "for" his re-election.

The other Yahoo! directors are missing similar numbers of votes compared to 2007 and 2006.

What this means is that we appear to have roughly 200 million Yahoo! shares (averaged between 2007 and 2006) that were not counted in the 2008 results Yahoo! reported last Friday afternoon and then with the new results yesterday.

Where are these missing shares? Were they intended to be counted against the re-election of Yahoo!'s board and not?

Yahoo! needs to account for such a large discrepancy between this year's numbers and the past two years'. It's quite possible that Yahoo! shareholders did vote in record numbers against the Yahoo! board at this year's election but these results are not being shared openly.