What Happens When Nobody's Watching Your Election

A 200-plus unit Manhattan condo thought they were holding a routine virtual election. Votes were cast through Zoom chat and emergency intervention was required to certify the results. In this episode, Corinne Arnold and Will Kwan from EZ Election Solutions explain why they were brought in to salvage the situation. They walk through what went wrong, why the managing agent running the election created problems nobody anticipated, and how the chaos could have been avoided entirely. The conversation unpacks the warning signs other boards should watch for and reveals practical lessons about election security, voter privacy, and when to bring in outside help. If your building handles its own elections, this case study offers a cautionary tale worth hearing. Habitat's Emily Myers conducts the interview. 

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Transcript

Emily Myers: Welcome to Problem Solved, a conversation about challenges facing New York co-op and condo board directors. I'm Emily Myers with Habitat Magazine and I'm joined by Corinne Arnold and Will Kwan, managing partners at EZ Election Solutions. Great to have you both here. 

Corinne Arnold: Thanks for having us. 

Will Kwan: Thank you. 

Emily Myers: So obviously we're gonna talk about elections.

We'll discuss why relying on the managing agent to run your building's election may present a conflict of interest and how boards can avoid legal issues that might arise from a badly managed election. So let's start with a look at a 200 plus unit condo in Manhattan where voting took place using the online annual meeting's chat feature. Corinne, can you explain what happened here and why you were called in to sort things out? 

Corinne Arnold: So the managing agent had started this election from start until the meeting, and the meeting was held virtually, a couple of years after COVID. So it was a couple of years in. Something went awry in the meeting. We didn't attend a meeting. We got all the information after, and people were given the opportunity to vote in chat for whatever reason. So we had this very long chat log of the votes, and we had to go through and reconcile all of them.

Those votes were also made public, which as we know, a voting process inside of a building should always be private to the owners and shareholders of the community. 

Emily Myers: Clearly voting in the chat is not standard practice. Will, at what point did the board or managing agent realize that they needed outside help? 

Will Kwan: They basically reached out to us ahead of the elections, right?

They wanted us to serve as independent inspectors of election. So basically we are seen as auditors to make sure that the tally is done correctly, validate the unit on the registry to who the voters are. So , you know, I was asked pause the logs after the meetings.

 Really, we were engaged but very close to the election rather than from the start of the whole election season, which is how we would like to get involved. We wanna help plan the whole process from beginning end, so we have a more comprehensive process. In this specific case we were brought in after they had set up a date for the election and decided to go ahead with it, then decided, okay, we actually need somebody to kind of serve as inspectors.

Emily Myers: Okay, so you came in as a third party service. You didn't offer your standard service, but more of a, an auditing operation. . And so what was the outcome for this building? 

Corinne Arnold: Almost a crisis management, if you will. Really the election had gone awry and we came into certify it.

Emily Myers: Yeah. So what do your services cost? Are there different pricing tiers for your services and what do they include? 

Corinne Arnold: Yeah, so we have pricing between three and 4,000 for an online meeting; between four and 5,000 for a in-person meeting; and for a hybrid meeting it's between six and 7,000, just baseline.

And then you start to get into other costs: do you wanna have an onsite ballot box? Do you want us to do the mailings? We are a bespoke company. We do whatever the client needs and we like to follow the norms of the building and how things have been established. And of course we work with your attorney and your managing agent to make sure everything goes very smoothly and in accordance with BCL laws and your bylaws and other legal requirements.

Emily Myers: We mentioned the fact that there could be a conflict of interest. Of course, at an annual meeting election, you may be voting in new board members, and those board members may be running in order to change the managing agent. Is that a situation that had been presented here? 

Corinne Arnold: It was a situation that was presented here.

Several of the board members were against the current managing agent, wanted to switch, and then the managing agent themselves were running the election and then it all went awry. And then I think in the end they did switch managing agents.

Emily Myers: So what are then some of the risks of running an election in such a disorganized way? 

Corinne Arnold: The risk is that it's not done legally.

Will Kwan: We could tell you how we would do it. If we engaged, let's say at least six weeks before an election, we will review their bylaws, see how to see their prior years documents.

We go through it and we have our own format, how we would set up. We also handle for in this case a virtual meeting. We would handle a registration process. Now, a lot of the managing agents will just set up a Zoom meeting link, and that's the standard they would set out, and if people can join. We have a different process.

We like to validate people. So we have a registration form that we have people register and we confirm that registration to the shareholder in the co-op, or unit owner in a condo, to the registry that the managing agent provides to us. And then once we validate that they are indeed a unit owner or shareholder of record, we then send them the Zoom link .And we do things in a Zoom webinar rather than zoom meeting.

So we control that aspect of security very tightly. And that way, when people come into the meeting, we can actually check their attendance as if you are in an in-person meeting where you sign in. So essentially that link is sent to you and your email, so we can track that way.

And we also handle digital voting. Not every building will allow digital voting. And so if they do allow digital voting, we handle digital as well as paper, PDF, and we basically become the recipient of that information. And we would then validate and make sure that if they do digital voting, there's rules set in place to make sure that they don't over vote, they don't vote for more candidates that they have.

So when whereas you vote by paper, those rules are not in place. So there are certain regular protocol that we follow that will actually enhance the process and then make sure that the results come out as it's expected. 

Emily Myers: Okay. And perhaps you can just elaborate on some of the biggest mistakes boards and manager agents make when they all hand their elections on their own.

Will Kwan: I would say most managing agents are proficient in checking their bylaws and tallying, knowing with cumulative voting and how that works. We make sure that when we run the election, we also check with the corporate council to make sure that we interpret the rules according to how they're interpreting rules, because then we would do tally, we could make sure that we follow those rules correctly. So there's no question that if we're being audited we have results to back our findings, our tally. 

Emily Myers: Of course many boards might expect their managing agent to run their elections, and perhaps they see that there's no conflict of interest.

They like their managing agents, so they assume that is part of their services, rather than paying the extra cost of a third party. Why would you argue that boards should spend that extra money on services like yours? 

Corinne Arnold: I think that the truth is that managing agents are stretched. The Local Laws in the city have increased exponentially. The amount of demand on the managing agents has been really a lot. And even as a board member in my building, I've seen over the past 10 years how we used to have time for little things, and now it's all Local Laws, it's all business. We have time for nothing.

And the managing agents are no exception. So as the managing agents are more focused on Local Laws and delivering all of the other facets they need to deliver more demanding shareholders, really needy board members. It's really nice to be able to outsource this function, and the cost if you're in a big building, a hundred units plus, which is really where we focus, is really not that big as compared to your relative budget.

It's cheaper than a Christmas party. And I think it makes a lot of sense to outsource it just so that you have no perception of conflict of interest, and there's more of a reason to do it if you like your managing agent, so that everything is above board, so that no one has any questions, so that when voters do have individual questions, you're not inundating the managing agent with them.

There's an outside party that everyone knows is neutral and doesn't have a vested interest at all in the outcome of the election.

Will Kwan: The key thing to add to that is also people don't need to know how their neighbors voted. So if there's a case where we've dealt with where it's a contentious election, where there's fewer seats than more people running. And it's, different political views of how the board should be run. They don't want to know that, shareholder A voted a certain way and now they constrain the relations as a neighbor.

 We are independent; we don't know these people. We basically can only validate how they voted and that they voted correctly. We don't involve the politics of the building. Because of the neutrality and the way that we can give you the summary, we won't tell you how person voted, but what the summary is.

So that gives a level of transparency, but , so that managing agents are not saying, okay, we biasedly favor this board member. It's no such thing. 

Emily Myers: Okay. So what are some of then the takeaways for other boards? I know we've touched on them, but how would you sum that up?

Corinne Arnold: The takeaway is that we recommend using an outside firm. That it really is better for the managing agent. It's better for the shareholders, and it's better for the board. That would be my takeaway. 

Will Kwan: Yeah. And where we've been engaged also for amendment votes. So people will, for example, change their smoking policy or changing the name of a entity ,or amending their proprietary lease, changing flip tax, sublet fee amendments-- those things that generally take longer and you need a majority vote?

A super majority vote? So they would engage the outside party, say that this is gonna take a longer track who voted and how this is progressing. So they would engage us in those services. 

Corinne Arnold: The final point is that the online voting, everyone likes it.

It's very easy to use. You can't over vote, you can't mess it up. We have a very easy process. I've had 90 year olds call me and say, I'm not gonna know how to vote online. They click on the link, they're like, oh, this was so easy. So we really do satisfy the full electorate no matter what age. 

Emily Myers: Perfect.

Thanks so much for chatting with me today. 

Corinne Arnold: Thank you for your time. Thank you, Emily. 

Emily Myers: Corrine Arnold, and Will Kwan, managing partners at EZ Election Solutions. 

Will Kwan: Take care.