Secret Ballots

[Guest Gene]

When HOA secret balloting is used, can the ballots be numbered to correspond to who is voting.  The ballot is secret from all those at the meeting, but it provides a record of who voted to establish validity of the ballots.

[Hieu H. Huynh]

That doesn't seem secret to me.

[Richard Brown]

What you describe defeats the secrecy of the ballot.  No one... not even the tellers... is supposed to know or be able to figure out how someone voted.  You control ballot access by being careful who gets a ballot and how they are turned in. 

 

[Tom Coronite]

I have seen double envelope systems used, but in those cases it's an outer envelope that is marked, not the ballot itself.

For example, I receive my ballot and vote my preference on it and place it in a sealed unmarked envelope. I then place that unmarked envelope in another envelope that has a number, or initials, or some mark. That outer marked envelope is used to verify I'm a member entitled to vote. After verification, the inner sealed unmarked envelop is placed with all the others into the ballot box. End result is when the ballots are tallied, they are being taken out of sealed unmarked envelopes to ensure secrecy. As the previous posts have indicated, a secret ballot isn't secret if it indicates who it's from.

But to be clear, such a procedure was in our own rules, not RONR.

 

[Dan Honemann]

20 minutes ago, 1stChurch said:

I have seen double envelope systems used, but in those cases it's an outer envelope that is marked, not the ballot itself.

For example, I receive my ballot and vote my preference on it and place it in a sealed unmarked envelope. I then place that unmarked envelope in another envelope that has a number, or initials, or some mark. That outer marked envelope is used to verify I'm a member entitled to vote. After verification, the inner sealed unmarked envelop is placed with all the others into the ballot box. End result is when the ballots are tallied, they are being taken out of sealed unmarked envelopes to ensure secrecy. As the previous posts have indicated, a secret ballot isn't secret if it indicates who it's from.

But to be clear, such a procedure was in our own rules, not RONR.

 

This is very close to the procedure described in RONR, on pages 424-25, for voting by secret mailed ballot, but any form of voting by mail must, of course, be authorized in the bylaws.

[Tom Coronite]

That's probably where we got it.  :-)

[Bruce Lages]

Perhaps guest Gene will come back to clarify whether this is ballot voting being done entirely within a meeting, or with a mail ballot in addition to the meeting voting. That's not clear, at least to me, from his initial post.