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Yahoo And The Fishy Miscount

There's something fishy about the supposed miscount in last Friday's Yahoo shareholder vote. In a blog post, Henry Blodget points out that companies don't simply go into proxy votes hoping for the best. Rather, they hire expensive firms to poll shareholders in advance so they know how the vote will probably turn out.

Given that, Blodget says it's pretty unbelievable that Yahoo certified the original results so fast, because surely, they must have seemed surprisingly strong to CEO Jerry Yang and co, which is why Yahoo should have double checked to make sure the proxy firm had run its spreadsheet properly.

In the end, the so-called "truncation" error cost Yang and Chairman Roy Bostock a whopping 19 percentage points of support, but it didn't change the result: Yang and Bostock both get to keep their heads -- for now.

Read the whole story at Silicon Alley Insider »

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