Anyone using electronic voting?

We are opening a research project to determine if out covenants and state laws allow for electronic voting by residents. Looking for some invites from anyone currently using or have been involved with a group who have employed this type of system.
Thanks in advance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_mqe-kNpXE

carefully understand the law. for example in some states not allowed to vote in person and online. has to be one or the other.

How in the hell can you charge an $100 hr, when we at HOATalk.com are providing the advice?

Some previous discussion at

https://www.hoatalk.com/Forum/tabid/55/forumid/1/postid/322951/view/topic/Default.aspx

BillD

> Our Board came up with a complex, legal, and functional electronic voting system.

With all due respect, you’d have to prove to me that it exists and functions (and is trustworthy and fair and secure and handles all necessary scenarios etc) before I’d even try a free demo. Voting (and ranking etc) are notoriously thorny problems; ref https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem for one. Google on ‘ranking’ sometime - there’s a LOT of papers out there. (Many of them focus on horse-racing, which I find amusing).

I personally think it’s possible to set up an electronic voting system that satisfies most requirements well enough for an HOA (and it might be an interesting startup biz). But it’s a nontrivial endeavor. It’s not something your nephew Elmo can slap together in a week.

BillD

PaulP17, I owned a unit in a COA that switched to electronic voting. The CC&Rs arguably did not allow this, but everyone (COA attorney, Board, owners) thought it would do just as you said (improve turnout), and it did, massively.

If you google on:

online election companies coa hoa

a number of companies will come up. I think your research should include talking to at least three of these companies.

Paul, my apologies for the snark in my previous comments. Happy to help and share what we do. It worked well.

First of all, Washington State passed a new law allowing for electronic voting during COVID and it made it permanent so we can do this on an ongoing basis. There are two requirements given by our attorney:

1. All members have the right to vote, whether electronic, paper, or in person
2. Each vote must be validated as coming from someone with the right to vote
3. One vote per property (we are single family homes, not a condo with fractional voting rights)

What I did was create an electronic survey. I used Office 365 survey capabilities but one can use SurkeyMonkey or another survey platform of choice. Each homeowner had to fill out two pieces of information, which were mailed to them in advance. One was their name, which of course they already know. The second was their 5 digit account number which is only known by them, the property management firm, and the board. Thus, by filling out those two pieces of information, we have good confidence that only people with the right to vote were voting in the election.

To make things easier for homeowners, we mailed out the ballots along with an introductory page. The introductory page included a QR code where one could scan with their phone and open the survey on their phone. The paperwork mailed to each homeowner also included a paper ballot. Homeowners were invited to fill out the ballot using their phone/computer, to fill it out by hand and take a picture/scan it and send to the property manager, or to mail it in via USPS mail. Homeowners in our community used all three ways to return their ballots.

In Washington, each vote received counts toward quorum, and I set a goal to meet quorum prior to the annual meeting. To encourage people to vote, we offered a $100 gift card to a place of their choice. I noticed a large number of landlords submitted ballots and I think they were incentived by the $100 gift card.

For ballot questions, we had two Board positions up for election and two people running, so people could vote for two. We also allowed for a write in, which we received no write in candidates.

We also placed two advisory vote items on the ballot for things that we wanted to solicit homeowner opinion on. We were clear that these are not binding decisions but rather something we wanted homeowner input for.

Overall, we meet quorum prior to the meeting which was great and we will do this again next year.

Our Bylaws allow BOD nominations from the floor. The only way to accomplish this is have a physical meeting. We just had our first face to face meeting in 2 years. We kept the same BOD in place during that time. We notified our owners of this and no one bit our ankle.

Our by-laws require the same, so at our annual meeting I asked if there was anyone from the floor that wanted to run. Heard crickets. Requirement met.

Well, since we had two candidates and two open positions, there really wasn't much question as to who won.

If we had a hotly contested race, which we have not in the 10 years that I lived year, we might need to look at having an election committee run the system. These are often referred to as tellers and two or more homeowners serve as tellers to monitor the voting. I think it might not be difficult to round up people willing to be tellers in a hotly contested race. It would have been impossible this time around because nobody really cared or saw the need/purpose to validate the votes.

Part of the reason for secret ballots is less likelihood of retaliation.

Paul,

While I'm a huge fan of CAI's "industry first" approach to their work, CAI has nevertheless produced some reasonably useful documentation and resource material for CICs. You might like the Electronic Voting & Virtual Meetings page (https://www.caionline.org/Advocacy/Priorities/elecvoting_virtualmtgs/Pages/default.aspx). You might also like to review the Electronic Ballots and Voting information on this page: https://www.(LINK-NOT-ALLOWED-PER-POSTING-RULES)/resources/vendors.

My personal recommendation in terms of balancing value and features is VoteHOANow.

Regards,
Steve

CORRECTION: I intended to say "I'm NOT a fan of CAI's industry first approach"...

We've used VoteHOANow for 2 years now. It's not about a "more secure" election so much as online voting should not be managed with MS Forms or Google Forms or any other such DIY survey tool. Use of DIY tools for any type of formal corporate action (elections, governing documents changes (amendments, restatements, etc.) is inappropriate for multiple reasons.

Every CIC is different to an extent, but spending ~$750/yr (0.05% of our annual budget) on VoteHOANow to remove a majority of the burden from our volunteers and management company (someone still has to supply an accurate list of members, their unit #'s, email addresses, names, etc.) is WORTH IT.

This is a much longer conversation, but I've found that many CICs fail to understand the value of specific services in specific situations and constantly debate reasonable expenses to the point that they do a poor job of serving their owners. Expenses should generally go UP every year and every CIC homeowner should be prepared for an assessment increase. Whether that's simply to compensate for inflation, or to better fund reserves or to pay for reasonable services that make sense like VoteHOANow, it doesn't matter.

Regards,
Steve

> HOA election security

When I ran for my Board last year, I had some very real concerns about honesty and fairness. I made it clear that I wanted to reign-in our PMC/PM. And, of course, the election was overseen by our PMC/PM.

I’ll never really know what happened backstage - maybe nothing - but I made a lot of noise about my concerns (I quoted Reagan a lot: “Trust but verify” which was personally traumatic because I effin’ hated Reagan) and I don’t regret it.

(Our PM quit not long after I was elected. I call it a win).

BillD

Again, it's no less secure than using paper proxies. Anyone can forge a paper proxy and it would be really difficult to figure out which proxies were real and which were forged. I would go so far to garner that our DIY election system is a step more secure than paper proxies, as it requires a piece of information known only to the homeowner, when the paper proxy form required only information that was publically known. I suppose the handwriting of the signature is uniquely identifiable, but the Board/PM doesn't know what each person's signature looks like so we can't readily verify signatures.

In California, elections for directors, among others, has to be done by secret ballot, actually closely resembling how counties run state and federal elections, that Michael's way of conducting an election wouldn't fly.

It's funny, in light of the nonsense from the 2020 elections, people got their panties in a bunch for supposed mishandling of that elections and wanting all the secrecy, yet people in HOA's could care less how elections are run in their associations when the directors running their complexes have a more immediate effect on their daily lives than those yoyos in Washington or their state capitals.