Voting Irregularitie!! What to do?

I am a Board member of a 400+ single family HOA. We just finished a very wild election where 2 board members that had previously quit the board decided they wanted to return to power. They got a third person to run and asked the community to Vote all three members so that they could get control of the community.

Without going into all of the details. When the 2 old time board members were on the board they had as little as 3,000 in the operating account and many pet projects were just approved with money out of the reserve funds. Since they resigned and the new board took over nearly 2 years ago we have increased our operating account to over $240,000 and have cut all of the fat they produced.

During this election our property manager noticed that more than a few HOs had requested new ballots and many were friends of the Ex Board members who were running for the board. The 2 Ex board members also lost the ballots that were mailed to them. We found this very odd that 2 people that wanted to become board members would not take care of the ballots mailed to them. We think that they filled out ballots for homes that were either forclosed or were owned by absantee owners.

When we asked the property manager what could be done before the Election she told us that we really could not stop them from cheating if they really wanted to.

The good news is that I won my spot on the board. The bad news is that 2 of the 3 others won spots. We lost two members who had done a great job and replaced them with the others.

I want to make sure that our next Election does not have this same issue. We thought up the idea of numbering the outside envelope that is mailed back to the PM so that the PM would know the number of the envelope for the house that it was mailed to. If someone requested a replacement ballot they would issue a new ballot with a new number for that address. Any ballot that would come from a ballot that was replaced would not be counted.

When we presented this option to the PM she said that we could not do it. I do not understand why since we would still have the sealed ballot inside this numbered envelope that would be opened by the Inspector of Elections.

Am I missing something? All we want to do is make sure that the Election is done legally and without the oportunity for cheating.

Sorry for the long note,
Mark

should have added that proxies can only be used if your State and/or governing documents allow for proxy voting.

I may not have been clear in my original post.

We currrently mail a outer envelope that has the ballot sealed inside it once it is filled out. The current system makes the HO sign this outer envelope and write in the address the ballot is coming from. The only place that the numbering would appear is on the part that already has HO information. The ballots are collected by the Inspector and not opened untill the Annual meeting. This person opens all of the outer letters and then opens and tallies the votes.

We are no differant than any other HOA and quorum is usually very hard for us to get. It would not work to ask them to vote in person.

The additional numbering would keep duplicate ballots from being questioned. It takes 140 to make quorum in our HOA which ussually takes 2 to 3 attempts in our community. We had over 210 turned in this last election at the first meeting.

Susan,
What I am saying is that we have no way of verifind that they are the actual HOs. We had at least 10 ballots that came from outside Property management companies that means anyone could have signed the outside envelopes.

We had 6 candidates running for 3 spots. I got the most votes with 119 and the person who finished 6th had 93 votes. Each HO had 3 votes to give. When you just take the 10 ballots from outside PMs that is 30 votes.

Do you permit cumulative voting, Mark?

Carol,
Yes we have cumulative voting. This election we had 3 open seats and each member could cast 3 votes.

Mark

Mark,

If I am reading your post correctly it sounds like your HOA has taken "secret ballot" to the point where you don't even know if the ballots are coming from bona fide members.

I would suggest that you begin by creating a roster of owners and collect a sample of each owners' signature. When you send out mail-in ballots you should include a pre-printed return envelope that identifies the name and address of the member and requires that the member(s) sign and date the envelope. The ballot itself would contain no identifying marks. When ballots are returned by mail, the election committee can verify that the envelope has been returned by a genuine member by comparing information on the envelope against the roster of owners. Assuming that you also have in-person voting, the envelopes would remain unopened until the in-person voting is completed. The register from the in-person voting would be compared to the mail-ins. If an owner mailed in a ballot and then voted in person, his mail-in ballot would be discarded. You would also discard envelopes that contain more than one ballot. If an owner mails in more than one ballot (he said he lost the first one), only his last ballot would be counted.

Once you are satisfied that no one has voted more than once, then you open the envelopes, remove the ballots, put the envelopes and ballots in separate places, and count all ballots (both mail-ins and in-persons). This is essentially the process used by city government. It assures that only authorized persons are voting, that they only vote once, and it preserves the secrecy of the ballot.