Voting

You just hold the meeting in person with only a handful of people there, socially distanced, and get proxies from enough others to achieve a quorum. If your bylaws (or Florida law does) allow meetings by videoconference, you hold the meeting solely through Zoom or the like.

NormaB3, can you say whether this is a condo or non-condo? The reason I ask is that Florida has a statute for condominiums (FS 718) and a statute for non-condo HOAs (FS 720). It saves people here a lot of time if there is only one statute to check.

Norma, please clarify Augustin's question and whether the election if for officers or directors

Homeowners associiation

No general election of directions by majority vote of members. No proxies allowed by our governing documents.

That's the thing. Florida law does not allow for HOA members to attend a homeowners' meeting remotely through electronic means (telephone conference call or Zoom video, for instance). The law does allow Directors to attend Board meetings remotely, but there's nothing even remotely similar with respect to owners and Members' Meetings.

Where HOAs are concerned, Florida's HOA statute FS720 is completely different than the condo statute FS 718 regarding elections. An election may not even be necessary, although if one is, it must be held in conjunction with the Annual Meeting. Other than that, the Florida HOA statute defers to an association's Bylaws on virtually every detail of election procedures.

Most attorneys in Florida seem to think that a Board doing the best it can to cope with the difficult circumstances posed by COVID-19 will not face the wrath of any judge or arbitrator should a dispute arise. That's also up to interpretation where "doing the best you can" is concerned. One board's "we've asked our attorney and she recommends we hold a Zoom meeting", is another board's "we don't even know how to turn a computer on and we're definitely not paying our attorney hundereds of dollars for an opinion regarding something we're not going to do anyway".

"Do the best you can" is fraught with problems.

If you are talking about attempting membership meetings during the pandemic, I think the only problems could be that someone threatens the HOA with litigation:

-- (A) for not holding an in-person meeting, but instead holding a zoom and phone meeting, because this violates the covenants.

-- (B) for holding an in-person meeting, in disregard of state guidelines or possibly state orders, and at risk to people's health; and requiring considerable expense to disinfect the place where the meeting is held.

-- (C) for not holding any membership meeting.

"Fraught with problems" is not a phrase I would use to characterize these choices. A board chooses the least damaging choice, which I think is clearly (A)

This is aHOA

That is what we are doing. We have outside space with seating to accommodate. Only a small percentage of our members usually show up for meetings which sad. We have nothing on our agenda requiring a vote of the membership so we should be okay