Ballot Harvesting

Condo located in Connecticut.

Monthly meetings have been held on Zoom. This past June, the association planned to hold normal annual Officers elections. The PM issued specific guidance to all UO's regarding how to submit the ballots to the PM. There was no proxy voting, only secret ballot voting. All ballots were to be faxed, emailed, or mailed to the PM office for compilation.

The day before ballots were required to be forwarded to the PM, I was advised that two uo's who were running for positions on the BOD, were soliciting UO's for support. If the UO who was approached for support agreed to the support, then the two persons running for office asked the UO to hand over their ballot. A total of 20 UO's signed and turned over their ballots to these two candidates. The ballots were subsequently delivered to the PM office personally by these candidates.

The day of the Unit Owners meeting, I requested from the Board President and PM to be placed on the agenda prior to the election results being announced in order that I could put forth a motion to void the election based on the ballot harvesting. I rose to place the motion on the table, but was shouted down by a group of UO's who appeared to be intoxicated, and were viewing the zoom meeting all together inside a UO,s garage. The President did not make any attempt to restore order or respect my right to speak under Robert's Rule of Order.

After that meeting, I informed the President that I intended to examine the ballots which according to the association by-laws are to be kept for one year. When I went to the PM office,he informed me that the President instructed him to cut all the ballots in half.

Has anyone on this site experienced a situation like this?

Doh on me. The OP kindly posted it right at the beginning of his post. Thank you for doing that.

IF, this were California, there would be a serious problem with a candidate collecting ballots. They can collect proxies, but since there are no proxies, then the election should be invalidated.

The reason, the chain of custody was broken. The OP stated the ballots had to be faxed, emailed or mailed. Dropping off was not an option.

How could the ballots be "secret" if faxed, etc.??? "Secret" the way it's used in CA HOAs means no one know who voted for whom.

How can a voter fax a sealed ballot?

I haven't seen any more responses from the OP, so I hope he found a way to resolve this.

Our community ity hasn't had this issue. We send out proxies that can only be mailed in, dropped off at the property manager's office, or bought to the meeting (usually by whoever the owner designated to cast a vote on his/her behalf. The mailed proxies (which double as ballots) are opened and counted during the meeting.

In this case, it would appear the candidates who collected ballots were in the wrong (how can you tell they weren't tampered with?). I'd also be concerned the person signing the ballot might not be a bona fide owner or is delinquent and ineligible to vite. That's another reason we open the ballots at our meeting - we check against the homeowner list and only work those home receive a ballot.

Personally, I'd suggest another vote and this time, skip the faxing or emails. If you still want to do this electronically, there should be some sort of portal where homeowners could only vote once (inputting an account number might help because the computer could recognize another vote and void it). That may be something to consider for the next election, so you'll have time to research the matter to make sure this is compliant with your documents and possibly state HOA law.

The ballots would be emailed, mailed or faxed directly to the PM.
During the harvesting process, the ballots were viewed by the individuals who personally transported the ballots to the PM, which removed the secrecy of the ballots.