Great Southern shareholders re-elect board members

Great Southern Bancorp Inc. (Nasdaq: GSBC) shareholders re-elected three board members.

Chairman William Turner and directors Julie Turner Brown and Earl Steinert Jr. were appointed last week to new three-year terms, according to a May 9 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The board members ran unopposed for the seats. Each received millions of votes for re-election and hundreds of thousands of withheld votes, which are generally made to express dissatisfaction with a candidate, according to SEC.gov.

The votes were:
    •    Turner, 9.2 million votes, 316,249 withheld;
    •    Brown, 9.1 million votes, 359,734 withheld; and
    •    Steinert, 8.7 million votes, 769,220 withheld.

Turner, the former chief executive of Great Southern and father of current CEO Joe Turner and board member Julie Turner Brown, has served as chairman of the board since 1974. His daughter, an attorney with Carnahan, Evans, Cantwell & Brown PC, has held a board spot since 2002, and Steinert, co-owner of EAS Investment Enterprises Inc., was first appointed to the board in 2004.

Shareholders also submitted 11.8 million votes in favor of appointing BKD LLP as its independent public accounting firm for the year. There were 206,695 votes against the measure and 4,927 abstentions.