SAN FRANCISCO – Shareholder rebellions at Yahoo are becoming like presidential elections – they are happening every four years.

Activist investor Starboard Value launched a widely anticipated mutiny Thursday in a letter announcing its intent to overthrow Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and the rest of the company’s board. It marks the opening salvo in a battle for control of Yahoo Inc. that could drag into the summer.

This is the third attempted coup at Yahoo since 2008, all led by different shareholders fed up with different management teams’ fruitless attempts to turn around the company.

The two previous uprisings in 2008 and 2012 culminated in Yahoo giving board seats to the dissident shareholders. The unrest also contributed to the departures of two of Yahoo’s previous CEOs, company co-founder Jerry Yang and Scott Thompson.

Now, Mayer’s job is in jeopardy as a prolonged revenue slump at Yahoo deepens nearly four years into her reign as CEO.

“We have been extremely disappointed with Yahoo’s dismal financial performance, poor management execution, egregious compensation and hiring practices, and general lack of accountability,” Starboard CEO Jeffrey Smith wrote in Thursday’s letter.

As part of a process known as a proxy fight, Starboard nominated nine alternative candidates to oppose Mayer and Yahoo’s other current directors at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in June.

The list of alternatives includes Smith, who has been publicly skewering Yahoo for the past 18 months in an attempt to pressure Mayer into taking drastic steps that he believes will boost the company’s stock price.

Starboard, which owns a 1.7 percent stake in Yahoo, engineered a 2014 proxy battle that tossed out the entire board of Darden Restaurants Inc., the owner of Olive Garden.