Election of Board Members miscounted

I think the HOA/COA has to announce the mistake and the change of winners, and seat the new board as soon as possible.

For one thing, not seating a person who has actually won would be patently unfair to this person and grounds for a lawsuit.

Honesty, perhaps including an apology, is usually the best policy. Studies show that honesty with an apology even reduces malpractice litigation and its costs.

I would wonder why the count was off.

This sure reduces the trust of the Board that runs the Association. The Board will have a lot of work for them to obtain trust again.

And you are absolutely 💯 correct about the trust! We already had one resident instilling distrust regarding the Board. This just played into his narrative. NOW, the current President was re-elected in New count...and she says she doesn't want it! What?! Why was she on the Ballot? The other 2 candidates are tied. Emergency board meeting tonight. Have no idea what's going to happen. They even screwed up the "at large" candidates. Unbelievable

I think the rule of thumb is that if the issue was only a miscount, then correct the final tally, apologize, and announce the correct winner(s).

If there was something wrong with the election process - eg. duplicate, missing or altered ballots - then a new election should be held, with an explanation of what went wrong the first time and how it will be corrected.

The new board should probably review the process to see why this went wrong. I agree it shouldn't be that hard to count votes correctly. But I can see issues if:
1. the vote counters haven't done this before, the instructions weren't clear to them, and they didn't ask questions until they understood;
2. there is a large number of ballots;
3. you have nominations from the floor;
4. you have write-in candidates;
5. the vote counters are expected to do anything in addition to producing a list with candidate names and votes received.

The responses are hilarious! Still don't know how the count was off. There has to be a simple explanation and it might make the solution easier to obtain.

One thing I caught is the OP is saying that members were electing officers, is this true?

Because of the resignations and the timing, I would suggest a new election altogether. Maybe, this time they could get it right.

They got bigger issues if they can't figure why the count was off. How the hell can you prepare a budget if you can't count?

I see this as a choice between two evils:

- The Board can acknowledge the mistake and declare the rightful winner, or

- The Board can stick with the “certified” winner.

I think it’s fairly obvious which choice would be easier to deal with afterwards.

BillD

Acknowledging the mistake and declaring the rightful owner is an evil?

Or did you simply mean that the first choice requires some labor and kvetching about having to go to the trouble of correcting a mistake?

More the latter than the former. I don’t mean it’s actually ‘evil’ - I meant that typically “choosing the lesser of two evils” means “you can’t avoid damage - but you can attempt to minimize that damage”. Just MHO but I’d much rather admit a mistake than have people think I’m dishonest / attempting a coverup.

BillD