Subject: Election Committee Update – Changes on Ballot
Good Morning QL,
Due to two owners, Cindy Maltby and Cindy Parlato, withdrawing from the 2020 Board of Directors election after voting had opened, questions were raised by another candidate. Answers to those questions and others posed to the committee was previously provided to all of the candidates in a single email. As there is now erroneous information being circulated througout the community from other groups the Election Committee Chair has requested the content of that email in its entirety be provided to all residents. Below is that email.
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From: Tammy Eaton
Sent: Monday, September 28, 2020 11:55 AM
To: Rick Baamonde; Gary Hagy; Carol Reiter; Tito Sandin
Cc: [email protected]; ‘Laura Smith
Subject: Candidate Questions Regarding Changes on Ballot
Good Morning Candidates,
As you know, your fellow candidate Andres (Tito) Sandin sent in the following questions to management and the election committee chair on Friday evening. Below is a recap of his questions and the responses:
- Do you know when will both Cindys be removed from the Ballot in SimplyVoting? As of 6:00 pm the ballot still the same.
- What will happen if anyone vote for one or both Cindys after 4:08 pm today until both Cindys names are remove from the ballot or their names are grayed out?
The Election Committee Chair conferred with management and legal counsel and per legal counsel there were two actions that needed to occur:
- Receive a formal request from those candidates requesting to be withdrawn from the elections.
- The two candidates that it was rumored were withdrawing were contacted by management advising each if they wanted to withdraw they must send in their own individual formal request to be withdrawn from the election. The candidates sent in their individual formal statements with one received at 3:00 pm and the other at 3:33 pm.
- Notify the community of the candidates that withdrew from the election.
- SimplyVoting was notified at 3:35 pm and a broadcast message was sent to the community at 4:06 pm.
Regarding removing the names from the ballot, per legal counsel, the names are not required to be removed from the ballot, however, SimplyVoting was requested to do so and they were able to update the ballots this morning. For those owners that casted a vote for either of the two withdrawn candidates the votes will show as abstained and will not be counted with that owner’s third vote, if cast, remaining and being counted. As provided to the unit owners, once you cast your vote, you may not change your vote. This format of voting is consistent with local, state and federal elections.
As a reminder this electronic voting election is fully managed by SimplyVoting and therefore all changes have to be submitted to them and are addressed by the SimplyVoting assigned project manager as quickly as they can and during their normal business hours. While there is an emergency contact at SimplyVoting, the issues of these two candidates waiting until the close of business on a Friday to formally notify the committee did not qualify. All legal requirements were addressed on Friday afternoon.
While not a question asked by Mr. Sandin, there has been questions about candidate names showing in alphabetical order. MCA and QL Bylaws state candidates’ names are to be listed alphabetically with no preference given. There is no specification as to if this is by first name or last name, however, the candidate bios were submitted to SimplyVoting alphabetically by last name yet when they created the ballot the candidate names showed alphabetically by first name. The project manager has been contacted and the names now show alphabetically by last name.
On a final note the management office was notified last week that there were issues with multi-unit owners not being able to vote once for each unit. As the owner that contacted us advised they had received 4 emails (one for each of the 4 units she owns) and opened all 4, we originally thought maybe there was an issue with the email addresses being the same and locking a multi-unit owner out. However, after sending the issue to SimplyVoting and they researched it they were able to show that owner did not actually open each email and click the link for each unique identifier. Management forwarded instructions for that owner to log in to the site, enter the unique identifier info and password for that unit, vote, log out and then log back in and repeat for each unit. We have not been contacted by any of the other 8 multi-unit owners advising of an issue. Further the owner that did contact us has not reached back out advising she is still having an issue so we assume it has worked fine for her now.
This is a new process for all of us and considering the last minutes changes thrown to us by some of the candidates it has gone well overall. As we all know, any time you convert from one process to another there will be some issues, it’s the nature of the beast.
Thank you on behalf of the Election Committee.