After a summer filled with embarrassment and more bending over than Paris Hilton’s seen in her lifetime, the little company that couldn’t have done it again, just when you thought it’d convinced everyone that all was well, now Yahoo has botched up its own shareholders’ vote — yes, the same vote that ultimately let its executives keep their jobs. In a final fitting twist, Yahoo hired to count the votes, pulled a Florida, and messed up the count. Broadridge Financial Solutions says a “truncation error” caused options for CEO Jerry Yang and other top executives to come in far higher than they should have. In a bad flashback from the year 2000, the concept of “recount” is making a resurgence. There’s no dramatic end to this derangement, though. Broadridge says its error didn’t change the outcome — Yang and his board of yahoos aren’t going anywhere — but it did reduce their margin of victory. Pretty significantly, too. The original results showed only 14.6 percent of shareholders withholding their votes for Yang. Now? It’s more than doubled to a full 33.7 percent. Chairman Roy Bostock’s not far behind. His percentage of withheld votes jumped from an erroneous 20.5 percent to an accurate 39.6 percent — still not enough to cost him his job, though. Most reports indicate the majority of withheld votes were signs of protest by “disgruntled shareholders.” No surprise. For these developments and an entire summer of suffering, we now issue a long-overdue honor to what has to be the year’s most ridiculed — and ridiculous — corporation. Yahoo, here’s one thing to be proud of: You’re the newest recipient of our prestigious award, the TechCult Sarcastic Salute. It was a unanimous decision. With that being said, though, there are some signs of a truncation error…so we’ll need a few weeks to confirm your conquest fully.
