How "by the book" are board elections usually held?

Our state attorney general publishes a set of guidelines for running board elections. These apparently are not mandatory. One of the items is that completed ballots should be placed inside a "ballot envelope", and this ballot envelope is what is either mailed or hand delivered to the ballot box for those people who vote early. This way, not completed ballot is visible to anyone until the counting process begins.

Our property manager has chosen to skip the use of ballot envelopes. Instead, mailed-in ballots will be opened and the "naked ballot" will be placed in the ballot box. In addition, anyone who hand delivers their ballots will place their naked ballot into the box. This means the property manager will see a large number of the completed ballots well in advance.

While I doubt our property manager would do anything nefarious, I don't completely eliminate the possibility that they could manipulate the results by "losing" ballots for candidates who they don't prefer (because a number of us have already expressed over the last year a desire to replace our current property manager with a different company.)

So I am debating how heavily to press them to more strictly adhere to the AG guidelines, based primarily on feedback I get from other HOA's. Does your HOA use the more secure "secret ballot" method, or do you use the "naked ballot" method?

It's interesting that you mention signature, because our AG's instructions specifically say the ballots should not be signed. I'm puzzled by that.

As long as the state's guidelines are just that, I don't think that you necessarily have to change a process that's working successfully. But I expect this would vary widely depending on the nature of your community and your current bylaws..

Our voting is all in-person, with proxies counting toward quorum only. This is in keeping with our bylaws.

Fortunately we're a small enough community that people know each other. Only verified homeowners at the meeting receive ballots. The ballots themselves are very simple, with only check boxes in front of candidates' names. Instructions are announced and repeated - it would be hard to mess up. Results are announced after the count has been verified by two independent homeowners.

Any monkey business would have to happen in full view of everyone at the meeting,

As my comments -

We'll probably never have another paper election, so I can't comment about the envelopes, etc.

For our community, we have a survey form setup on Microsoft Forms. The survey has options to vote who to get into office, a couple advisory votes, and two fields for personal data. One is the account number of the homeowner which we provide to them. The second field is their name. We require both fields to be filled out because we need to validate that someone authorized to vote casts the ballot. The account number is known only to the homeowner, not neighbors, for example.

We do mail or e-mail paper copies of the ballots to every homeowner and they are welcome to fill out the information, scan or photograph the form, and e-mail it in, or they can mail it in. About 95% used the electronic survey, 4% scanned and e-mailed, and 1 homeowner mailed it on via USPS mail.

This works well. It is not a secret ballot as whomever runs the election can see who votes for whom. It is not a problem in our community as we have to pull teeth to get people to run and do not have contested elections. If the elections were contested, we'd probably see if our property manager could run the election as the neutral party, but don't anticipate that being an issue anytime soon.

First, David, are the AG "guidelines" the law? Or just suggestions? Are they specifically for homeowners associations?

That other states are so casual has nothing to do with your state.

In CA all owners receive a ballot and two envelopes by USPS. The voter must sign & write their property address on the outer envelope; the ballot goes inside the inner envelope and the voter can mail in or hand deliver the ballot to our PM. By law, ballots are opened at an open meeting and any owner can observe the opening & tabulating, which is by 1-3 "inspectors of election," who are selected by the Board. This approach gives some level of confidence to owners that fraud isn't occurring.

Given your issues with the PM, I'd be really leery of permitting her to open the ballots unsupervised. But how do you get her to follow the "gudilines" when you seem to have no contact with your developer?

Talking to other HOAs is fine, but since you don't live in them, why not talk to the homeowners in YOUR community to see if they have any concerns about the election process?

You can always publish an article on your website or community newsletter (or both) stating the attorney general has published recommendations for conducting board elections, the board is considering adopting some or all of them, but first, you'd like to know if people have had any concerns about the current process. Remind people what that is and encourage them to write in (or use Survey Monkey or something like that where people could list their concerns). Based on what you see, the board (assuming you're on it) can make adjustments as needed.

Don't overthink this. While you're at it, this would be a good time to ask for volunteers to serve as counters for the next annual meeting. If you do this now, you'll have procedures in place and can train them on what they'll need to do, while ensuring the process is fair. The most your property manager should do is collect the ballots and bring them (unopened) to the meeting. If you have a lockable mailbox at your clubhouse, you could have people drop ballots in there, check for new envelopes daily, and then lock them in a secure location to be opened by two people at the appropriate time.

The article probably would have been a good idea. I fear it's late in the process now, and the PM would tell everyone I was being unethical in trying to affect the election since I am a candidate.

As far as asking for volunteers, changing the procedures, that is completely out of my hand. The Developer still controls the vote, and since he is disengage from the process the Property Manager is running things however they see fit, with no oversight other than any outrage I can stir among the residents.

They are going to have a lockbox at our clubhouse. I believe I will be monitoring that box closely. Fortunately, our on-site PM person is fine. It's her boss -- who lives in another town -- who is the problem.

I think you don’t get where I’m coming from. I have been the lone resident board member for the last two years, and I know our governing documents forward and backwards. I am specifically concerned about this election, not future ones. I am concerned because the PM is God right now, because the Developer is disengaged and has allowed them to run the show, as just one vote. I am powerless. And the PM absolutely does not want me on the board because they know I intend to fire them.

My immediate problem is that our documents are silent on the machinations of running our elections. I wish that our AG’s guidelines were mandatory, but they are not. So I am curious if this insecure methodology is so typical with HOA’s as to make it difficult for me to wage a successful pressure campaign against the PM.

For the bad guys to have the power and so either throw the election or use devious means is not unusual.

Other owners and you pay your hard-earned money to this manager. For the manager to take steps that may be ensuring you do not get on the board, and all so the (corrupt) manager is not fired, is painful. Toss in two years of hard work by you to get this HOA off on the correct foot and then some. It may very well be for nothing if a bunch of neophytes are elected and they do not go first to the governing documents to determine their every move in the next 12 months. Worse, what if the neophytes think the manager is the one who is supposed to run things?

I wish I had something to offer. You do not deserve this.

This is the "book" the OP was talking about.

https://attorneygeneral.delaware.gov/fraud/cpu/ombudsperson/fair-election-process/

Well, that’s a bit insulting. I have been on the board for two years, and have years of prior experience working with various non-profit and volunteer organizations and know the difference between a competent company and an incompetent one. Consider:

* Their turnover rate for the person assigned to our account has averaged two per year over the last four years

* they underbilled the developer for empty lots by over $50,000 over those four years. This currently in negotiations.

* They paid thousands of dollars of invoices that had been sent to the developer for expenses that were not the HOA’s. I found these errors and had them corrected.

* Expensed thousand of dollars against the 55+ portion of the community for expenses that were supposed to come out of the general fund. I found these errors and had them corrected.

* They insisted for months that when we reached our 75% benchmark the only change was that residents got one more seat at the board. I had to push relentlessly before they admitted that the 75% benchmark meant the residents gained full control of the board.

These are the highlights. The list is much longer. And now they are completely ignoring the attorney general guidelines for running an election. So I don’t particularly care if they are offended that a resident (who is a board member) has suggested they should follow best practices instead of what they have been doing.

And, btw, last year I formed an informal panel of 15 people, all of whom were active committee members, to analyze our PM contract and interview other companies. The unanimous decision was to ask our developer to not renew the PM’s contract. So this isn’t one guy waltzing in with no clue.

You do realize there is a difference between how I explain the situation here than how I approach matters IRL, don’t you? I always was diplomatic, but after the meeting with the developer in which I made the case for not renewing the contract, the PM viewed me as the enemy and has treated me that way ever since. And why do you say this is “right off the bat” as if I just stepped into this? I told you I’ve been on the board for two years. It was about six months ago, when the contract was up for renewal, that things got ugly. Sure, I was pretty damn firm when they were misappropriating thousands of dollars. But politely asking them to correct those issues didn’t always work. I did, however, always leave room to maintain a professional relationship.

I listed the egregious mistakes they made, so hopefully you could see this was not a personality conflict, this is a case of serious incompetence.

Under ordinary circumstance I would appreciate that opinion. But under declarant control, with a developer who is disengaged and a property manger mismanaging our money by the tens of thousands of dollars, I felt a stronger fiduciary duty to the other residents than anything else. Make no mistake - they don't want me off the board for any ethical concerns. They want me off the board because they don't want to lose the contract.

I predict the future to be a return to normalcy.