At their annual meeting today, the shareholders of the Walt Disney Company voted a proposal I submitted to adopt a bylaw provision concerning board adoption of poison pills that I submitted. With 879,028,289 FOR and 626,587,117 AGAINST, and 25,884,804 abstentions, the proposal won about 57% of the votes cast.

Although the proposal failed to get the majority necessary for amending the bylaws, the majority vote in its favor reflected strong shareholder support, and Disney’s chair John Pepper announced at the meeting that the board will give the proposal a “prompt and serious consideration.”

The Disney proposal is of a similar type to the one that I submitted to CA last spring. CA had to place the proposal on the ballot following litigation in the Delaware Chancery Court. An article about this type of bylaw is available here. At the CA annual meeting, the proposal got 41% of the votes, which induced CA to adopt a new pill whose terms enable shareholders to redeem it when a qualified offer is made.

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