Actress Melissa Gilbert was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, union officials said, defeating actress Valerie Harper in a fiercely contested race that could end up being contested over a flaw in thousands of ballots.
Gilbert, who played Laura Ingalls on the popular television series "Little House on the Prairie," received 12,280 votes, union spokesman Greg Krizman said late Friday. Harper, who was wisecracking Rhoda Morgenstern on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and later "Rhoda," received 10,692 votes.
The election took place during a time of discord within the union's ranks, following a lengthy commercial actors' strike last year and a barely averted walkout by movie and TV actors earlier this year.
Many prominent actors sided with either Gilbert or Harper during the campaign.
Friday's results came just a day after SAG's election committee decided to defer a decision on whether to impound the ballots because of a missing signature line on nearly a third of them.
Nearly 24,000 ballots sent to SAG members in New York failed to include the signature line, which critics said could allow their validity to be challenged.