In the story the never seems to end about Yahoo!, a recount yesterday of the Yahoo shareholder vote for its Board of Directors revealed a strong protest vote against five of the nine Yahoo directors, including CEO Jerry Yang.  Yahoo, Inc.’s revised vote tallies indicated 33.7 percent of votes were withheld for Yang, or more than two times the opposition to Yang’s reappointment to the Board as was reported in the first tally.

Early results from Friday's shareholder vote seemed to indicate that a favorable change in the climate toward the current Board. The initial tally reported was 85 percent of shareholder votes going to Yang.  The fly in the ointment in the Yahoo reported results occurred after one of Yahoo’s largest and most vocally negative shareholders, Capital Research Global Investors, called for a probe of the shareholder vote after it claimed that it found discrepancies in the results.

Yahoo has since announced that Corporate Election Services, Yahoo’s inspector of elections, advised that Broadridge Financial Solutions (a proxy voting intermediary for major investors) had made ‘significant’ errors in reporting votes at Yahoo’s Annual Shareholder Meeting. Broadridge released a statement acknowledging its error, but said that the error did not change the outcome of the election and that it was an “isolated incident.”

Three other Directors, including Chairman of the Board Roy Bostock, Director Ron Burkle and Director Arthur Kern, also had strong protest votes registered, with almost 40 percent of votes withheld for Bostock, and 38 percent and 32 percent withheld respectively for the other two Directors.  These three Directors are members of Yahoo’s compensation committee and have been heavily criticized for not doing more to tie executive pay to Yahoo’s actual performance.

Analysts were split as to whether the recount was a symbolic embarrassment to the current leadership or a new threat to its power. We are certain there will be more to come on this one.