Online voting software

I'm trying to drag our HOA into the 21st century and I'm investigating online voting software for HOAs. Our PM company does not have one, nor does our attorney. The big law firm that does a lot of lobbying here in Florida does have one, but we fired them and no thanks on their software. I own a condo in a different community here and they use one with a name that starts with "HOA". As a user, I find it works great. That community is larger than ours, probably 1500 units and ours only has 825. I was wondering if anyone had used that software or something similar and could tell me about the pros and cons and the pricing.

Our bylaws do allow electronic voting - we have just not ever implemented it.

Thanks!

Yes, you can google for hoa voting software. I have done that and there are several. The thing is - unless you have hotly competitive elections (few HOAs do), it's a waste of money to spend on hoa voting software when you can do it for free as I described above. The ones that I have checked with start at $1000 per election.

Our community prefers the free option. We do not have competitive elections and thus what I described works fine for us.

As mentioned, we cannot mention specific products. If you do have contested elections, you will want to make sure the system has the following:

* An email should be sent to each homeowner with a link to vote. There should be no option for these emails to be sent "CC:" anyone else (such as the PM, a board member, etc.) and each homeowner should have a unique link that ONLY allows them to vote. This is important to ensure that nobody can impersonate a homeowner and vote for them. Make sure you express this concern to whoever you speak to, and that they are able to address it in a way you understand.

* The results should be sent in PDF form, and care must be taken so that everybody involved can be certain that the results declared are the true results. This is another potential weak spot in electronic voting. Let's say the board secretary is in charge of tabulating votes. They get an email from the voting firm with the election results. The secretary can simply lie about the results unless there is something in place to prevent it. Even PDF files can be edited pretty easily. So consider a process to make sure that cannot happen.

* Importantly, the results must be auditable. For instance, any candidate or concerned homeowner ought to be able to, after the fact, ask for a copy of the results. Usually this would involve a fee. Make sure the fee is not prohibitive. Also, while you can only publish the totals, a detailed report with each lot# and their vote (or at least an indication that they did vote) should be saved, because generally open records laws will require that these be available.

Usually the cost is going to vary depending on how many vote. I know of one pretty good one that is only $99 for up to 1,000 homeowners.

one email per account is how my buddy who helps me with elections explained it.

make sure if you choose to make the election results public there are no questionsn that ask private information. my election buddy didnt' tell me about that and I was scrambling to remove the public view option because we had asked for people's emails in the vote. my election buddy only charged me $30 not $1000 to help out.

google Easy Online Election Excellence

you'll get several results and the one with the best price is $29 to $100 depending on your community.

Wendy, I already have my system figured out for free. No need to pay $100 or whatever for another company to run the election for us.

Also, our system allows people to vote by paper ballot which is important to our community. Not everyone wants to vote electronically and we can't exclude anyone for an election vote.

Who controls and tabulates your counts?