In this election year, some officials may be worried about whether enough voters get out to the polls, if candidates know enough about who they’re voting for, and whether the voting process itself is secure. But the elections in question don’t concern Vice President Al Gore or Texas Gov. George W. Bush, unless they happen to live in a condominium or co-op complex.
Garden City, N.Y.-based election.com is entering into the political world of residential real estate by partnering with the Honest Ballot Association to try to bring condo and co-op elections to a new level.
Among the advantages of using the Internet-based election process touted by election.com officials is the fact that it would allow voting from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. That, they say, would be ideal especially for condominiums in resort areas such as Cape Cod and the Berkshires, where there are high percentages of second-home owners who normally may not be around to cast votes in person for a condo election.
“We’ve approached a number of different organizations,” said William Taylor, senior vice president of election services for election.com. “And one of our markets is definitely New England.”
Election.com and the Honest Ballot Association first teamed up in March of this year. “It’s really a unique match,” Taylor said. “[HBA] has been conducting elections for better than 90 years, and our goal is to make the elections process more secure than ever before. The Honest Ballot Association is recognized throughout the [United States] as the authority on condo and co-op elections.
“They were looking for someone to help them in areas of technology, and we were looking to expand our market,” he added.
“We’ve conducted thousands of elections,” said Maralin Falik, executive director of HBA and the director of election services for election.com. “One of the problems we always had was that people own in locations where they don’t live, and we were faxing voting proxies everywhere, even to Europe. [Internet elections are] the perfect way of voting, because we’re making sure people don’t become disenfranchised.”
Having those additional votes is critical, Falik said, as often a condominium or co-op association has trouble getting a quorum – usually one-half or two-thirds of property owners – to proceed with the election.
“We also noticed people complaining that they weren’t getting their ballots in the mail,” Falik added, “and that ended up costing us extra for postage and printing.”
Taylor added that Internet voting would also be ideal for disabled property owners who may find it difficult to leave their home to go to the polling place, even if it is in the same building or complex.
For those condo or co-op owners who do not have Internet access in their homes, Falik said since the election is Web-based, votes can be cast from public computer terminals such as those in libraries. For those who still prefer casting a paper ballot, Taylor said that option would still be available.
“Not everyone is ready to vote on the Internet yet,” Taylor said. Paper ballots with unique identifiers would be available. “Once you utilized your number, that would be it,” he said. “If someone voted on paper, then tried to vote again on the Internet, we would recognize that they already voted.”
‘Complete Control’
While using the latest technology in voting for who will become the condo association president or deciding what to do about landscaping may seem extreme to some, Falik said condo elections are often hotly contested and scrutinized.
“We have to have complete control of the election. That’s our function,” she said. “Sometimes we have to go to court. This is no longer a mom-and-pop operation.
“The minute a complex spends $50,000 on a lobby that everyone ends up hating, they all start saying they didn’t vote for it, and we have to have proof they did.”
Falik said voters might also be more informed through Internet voting, because biographies of candidates, as well as explanations of proposed bylaws, can all be posted on the election Web site.
“If there’s a proposal for modernization which would change the grounds of the complex, we can put the blueprints on the Web site,” Taylor said. “If you’re in Boston, and your condo is in the Berkshires, you might not be able to get out there to see them in person, so this would help.”
Falik added that voting through the Internet is secure. “There’s more fraud through a paper election,” she said. “They bank [through the Internet], they sell stock this way. This system is incredible.”
Response so far to Internet voting has been positive. “Everyone that has seen it says they want it yesterday,” she said. Elections.com has signed a handful of contracts with condo and co-op associations. But because the endeavor began this spring, too late for many condo elections, the company has not hosted a condo election yet. The first such election could take place in the fall.
Before a fall condo election takes place, however, election.com will have a chance to showcase its technology on a much larger scale. The company, which conducted the world’s first online government election in March in Arizona for the Democratic presidential primary race, will also be providing online delegate voting at the Democratic National Convention this week in Los Angeles.
According to Taylor, as each state orally casts its votes for the presidential candidates, one of the delegates will simultaneously key in the number of votes at a computer terminal, which election.com will tally and then feed the results to the convention’s Jumbotron screens.
“They wanted to use this technology to make their convention an e-convention,” Taylor said.
The cost of hosting elections on election.com would vary according to the complexity of each election. “Every election is different,” Taylor said. “If you have a simple election with two candidates with a bio of each of them, that’s easier. An election like we did for the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers, for example, was much more complicated with regional and national ballots that had to be custom created.”
“They can’t get people to vote today,” Falik said. “If the U.S. president was elected in some places with less than 20 percent of the people voting, what about condos? I think if they had a choice to vote online, more people would vote.”