Most association votes happen on a show of hands, or on paper ballots that go into a folder. Six months later, the only thing that says the motion passed is somebody's memory of the room.
In HOA-OS a vote is opened, answered and counted in one place. The count moves while the vote is running, and when it closes, the record is already there.
What the video covers
- The voting page, with every vote the board has run or is about to run
- One open motion, and who gets to answer it
- A board member answering the ballot
- Participation against the threshold this community set for itself
- The same motion on the community's own site
- The vote passing that threshold while it's still open
- Closing the vote, and the record it leaves behind
- A vote from last month, run as an anonymous ballot
- Who hears the result
The full walkthrough, in words
The voting page lists every vote: what's open now, what opens next, and what has already closed. Each one shows who it's for, the whole community or the board on its own, and how it gets answered: yes, no or abstain, or a list of choices.
The open motion carries the question, the reasoning written into the motion itself, and the dates it runs between. A board member is part of the community, so the page asks them how they vote first, and it says plainly that their name will sit with their answer. They answer, and that's one ballot, kept.
The page then shows where the vote stands. In the video, 17 of 34 eligible members have answered, 50 percent. The mark on the bar is the threshold this demo community set for itself, 51 percent, and it's on screen while the vote is still open.
On the community's own site, a member who hasn't answered sees the same question and the same three answers. They pick one and send it. After that they can see their ballot was recorded, but the running count stays on the board's side.
Back on the board's side, the new answer has landed: 18 of 34, 53 percent. The bar is past the mark, and the badge beside it has changed from not met to met on its own.
Closing the vote is a board decision, and the page says what it does: no more ballots after this. The outcome comes from the ballots already in it: 11 yes, 6 no, 1 abstain, carried on participation that got past the threshold.
Nobody writes that record by hand. The share that answered, the count behind each answer, the threshold and whether the vote reached it are counted from the ballots each time the page opens. The record lives on the vote itself, attached to the motion it belongs to.
A vote from last month shows the same thing after the fact. 22 of 34 answered, past the threshold that vote was set with, across three designs, with the one that won. That vote ran as an anonymous ballot, so the counts are all there and nothing on it says who chose what.
Closing a vote sends the result to whoever the board picked for that vote. Anyone else still has to be told, the same way they always were.
Filmed in the product on a demo community with seeded data.
Questions boards ask about this
Is the 51 percent a fixed number?
No. It's the threshold this demo community set for itself.
Can a member see the running count?
Not from the community site. After answering, a member sees that their ballot was recorded, and the running count stays on the board's side.
Who hears the result?
Whoever the board picked for that vote gets it when the vote is closed. Anyone else has to be told the usual way.
Does the record show how each person voted?
The page shows counts, not individual ballots. The vote from last month in the video ran as an anonymous ballot, so nothing on it says who chose what.
Is that real community data?
No. It's a seeded demo community. The names and the motions were made up for the demo.
Related reading
- HOA annual meeting guide: how to prepare and hit quorum
- HOA proxy votes and absentee ballots, explained
- The HOA governance playbook
See what HOA-OS covers for self-managed HOA boards at hoa-os.com/self-managed-hoa-software.