Never Ending Votes

To make changes to our Covenants need 75%/244 affirmative vote. At our Annual Meeting a vote was taken to change to 67%. Proxy Votes show if not in hour before meeting they dont count. They were short 34 votes & are canvassing the park to get yes votes. How is this a never-ending vote? They will try to run all new covenants next annual meeting & say that can be never-ending vote also & any agenda item can be done this way. Existing covenants dont address this.

Seems like a problem right there. I bet if an audit was done of the votes, that many of the yes votes would be dissallowed because the people that cast those votes subsequently moved before the 500 threashold was met.

As a board member who'd like to get some CC&R changes done that will take 75% of the members to approve, I'm curious how dragging this out that long is possible.

My understanding was, the most you could do is adjourn a meeting to a later date (to keep the voting on an issue "alive"), but that proxies executed for the initial meeting would expire eventually. In FL, FS 720.306 specifies that a proxy expires 90 days after the date of the meeting for which it was originally given.

So, my plan for when we get the amendments written is to schedule a meeting at which we'd ideally vote, but more likely either not make quorum or more certainly not make the needed 75%, ask those present to execute proxies, and adjourn for some time (say 30 days). During those 30 days, we'd have to work on getting more proxies. At the next scheduled instance of the meeting of the members to vote on amendments, we'd count up the votes and proxies, and likely have to adjourn again, repeating the process until we either get 75% for, 25% against, or run out of time for the initial proxies to be valid. I suppose we could then approach those members who's proxies had expired and ask them to execute new ones.

OTOH, under FS 720.317, I believe we can implement electronic voting, and use one of those systems that allows for e-voting and e-proxies. If we have a meeting to vote on amendments, and members e-vote, if we adjourn to a later date to try to get more votes, are e-votes from the first meeting still valid to count at the next scheduled adjournment(s) of the original meeting? Or does collecting e-proxies make more sense, since those are valid at adjournments of the original meeting?

How can you have a vote go on for 3 years. There are procedures in your governing documents, normally the Bylaws that allow the MEMBERS to adjourn to a later date, but not an indefinite time. Who's checking the validity of the votes? Who is checking to see if owners voting rights were suspended?

My thinking on the e-proxies is, there's nothing terribly special about them and since our documents allow for use of limited proxy already, an e-voting system that can generate proxies just makes it easier to "save" those votes for subsequent adjournments of the meeting.

Still, I'm curious about the mechanics of how a vote [on amendments or anything] could be held open for years, as was suggested above.