Electronic Voting: Everything You Need To Know

Electronic Voting: Everything You Need To Know

Community living offers a great amount of benefits to all residents within. Nonetheless, sometimes residents miss out on a lot of these great opportunities for mere lack of involvement. As a board member, you want to carry out your job and represent the needs of all your residents, but how can this be achieved, when most of them are (sometimes through no fault of their own) uninvolved?

Many strategies have been tried (ranging from incentives to stricter regulations) to boost this resident involvement, yet many of these just lead to animosity or generate control groups. With this in mind, what could be the best way to simplify engagement for those who may simply “not have enough time to get involved”?

Electronic Voting could be the answer to your troubles! If your community is like (the vast majority) of communities around the country, it will often struggle to even get a quorum for annual meetings. The impact of this can go beyond just low participation. Votes to approve budgets, document amendments or updating memberships on important capital projects can all be impacted. In our ever-changing, modernized world, many communities are looking to the internet to help grow member participation through electronic voting.

Mind you, electronic voting is not a new concept by any means. Whether you realize it or not, we’ve all used electronic voting when we partake on reality shows like The Voice or America’s Got Talent. Of course, the stakes in each of these voting scenarios are different, but it just goes to show that we are more familiar with this concept than we perhaps realize.

The Deterrents (And Their Respective Solutions)

The most common argument used against Electronic Voting is of course, antiquated laws. A lot of communities have rules and regulations that require in person voting (because at the time of foundation, these were the norms state and nationwide). However, in the past few years a number of states have amended HOA and Condo laws to allow electronic voting, making it easier than ever to adopt the new technology and alleviate the woes. Today residents in over 20 states can use electronic voting for HOA or condominium matters.

Security and transparency are also an issue for implementing electronic voting. These concerns particularly grew in the early 2000s with the famous Diebold touch screen voting machines during the Presidential election. Needless to say, though, nearly all electronic voting vendors have processes in place to ensure the security and integrity of the voting process as they have learned from these past situations.

As with any change, residents may be a little hesitant to adopt electronic voting due to lack of understanding of the process or technology. Before implementing such a process, it would go a long way to host an educational session to explain the process to residents.

Even though there is no absolute solution to reduced engagement, electronic voting makes matters so simple, that the busiest of residents can partake in the decision-making aspects of their community, all within conditions that favor whatever situation they may be in. Electronic voting holds promise, especially in larger communities, to bring down costs and facilitate member engagement.

To learn more about how Castle Group can serve your community, request a proposal by visiting www.castlegroup.com/request-a-proposal