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Melissa Gilbert Wins SAG Presidency LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) - Former child actress Melissa Gilbert ("Little House on the Prairie") won a decisive victory on Saturday in her bid to retain the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild.
Gilbert, 37, won 21,351 votes out of about 38,000 cast, while her strongest competitor, Valerie Harper, 61, ("Rhoda"), received only 12,613 votes. The results put to rest the controversy over who will serve in SAG's top spot after last fall's election were nullified amid complaints from Harper's camp that the elections had been mismanaged after Gilbert won.
Gilbert defeated Harper in the initial vote for president of the union in November, but those results were thrown out by the union's elections committee in early January. The panel cited the lack of a signature line on ballots sent to guild members in New York and a two-day extension given to New York members to return their ballots.
The union's executive board then ordered a re-vote. Gilbert, best known as Laura Ingalls on the 1970s TV series "Little House on the Prairie," was allowed to remain in her post until the new results came in. "Our membership has once again spoken," said Gilbert in a statement announcing the results of the rerun election. "I'm honored to have been trusted by the SAG membership. With the rerun of the election now behind us, I welcome focusing on the crucial issues at hand." In a brief concession statement released by SAG, Harper thanked her supporters and said, "In this election, rerun in a fair and uniform manner, the real winner is the democratic process. I am grateful to everyone who participated in it. A total of 91,054 ballots were mailed to eligible voters nationwide on Monday, Feb. 11. By yesterday's deadline, 37,742 ballots, or a bit more than 41 percent of the total, were returned. SAG officials said that this represents one of the highest returns of election ballots in the Guild's 69-year history. By comparison, last fall's election, which sparked so much controversy, only received about 28 percent of the ballots back." Related Shows
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