What can you do to encourage higher turnout and more participation from your residential association’s voting delegates? These tactics will give you the insight needed to create more actionable outcomes from your next HOA or condo association election.
There are plenty of resources for learning how to hold more successful HOA elections, but it can still seem as if there’s never really a straightforward solution to helping associations meet quorum.
What's quorum? A quorum is the minimum number of members a deliberative assembly needs to conduct a meeting or any new business for on the assembly’s behalf.
By reviewing your association’s bylaws, you’ll learn the minimum number of votes needed from all eligible voting delegates. This means you can plan your voting events to encourage full or mandatory participation from your members.
That said, there are ways to help your organization hold better elections while reducing the level of effort put towards this election. Read on to see exactly what those tactics are.
Proxy voting allows board members to assign a delegate or proxy to cast their votes for them in the event of an absence.
Proxy voting is mostly effective for board votes and association elections that would otherwise conflict with a board member’s outside interests or personal affairs.
Allowing votes by proxy is great for keeping your organization compliant and ethical (but unfortunately, it won’t do much to help increase board participation or improve donor relationships).
For residential associations that allow voting delegates to cast absentee ballots, email is an effective, low-effort option for gaining a general consensus about an initiative or an issue.
One thing to note about email voting is that your members will likely need a manual reminder to cast their votes before key deadlines, and due to the unreliable nature of some email applications, some board members may not see your message until it’s too late.
The best voting platforms offer useful services so that enterprise customers can add custom email reminders to their package as needed.
Online voting lets board members login to a cloud-based, secure voting portal - not unlike a virtual voting booth and cast their ballots electronically within their web or mobile phone browsers.
This option works exceedingly well for board votes, as well as a host of other nonprofit operations.
Virtual election dashboards allow ballot makers more flexibility to host, manage, and analyze voting results in less time than it takes for email, proxy or in-person.
Before jumping straight into the online voting be sure to:
Quite frankly, needing to consistently meet quorum is an ongoing obstacle for most associations, but the aforementioned strategies can help create a more fulfilling and convenient voting experience for your delegate.
Creating a culture of reliable voter participation can be much more challenging, and that’s why eBallot offers solutions to help associations like yours make better decisions, collaboratively.
For example, when running a ballot to nominate new delegates, eBallot understands that not only do you need a solution to run the votes as soon as possible, but also that your members would like to know more about their potential representatives.
Also due to certain bylaws and regulations, many regions and municipalities require delegate elections to offer write-in candidates in the spirit of fairness.
Not only can we create custom HOA-branded ballots for your organization, but with our enterprise association voting suite, customers can have access to run nomination campaigns, create candidate profiles, conduct voter outreach, and create write-in ballots all in one intuitive, online election portal.
Giving your voting members or residents the opportunity to cast their most important ballots remotely may be a nervous thought at first, but it is truly a proven method to boosting participation, meeting quorum and more importantly, managing the ongoing business of your association.
Of course, if you’re worried about potential for voter fraud, feel free to check out our security page or contact our team directly to chat about our 100% cloud-encrypted anonymous data management.