CO-OP / CONDO ONLINE VOTING

Attorney Mark Hankin, a partner in Hankin & Mazel who is not affiliated with the property, has seen co-op boards throughout the city remain in office for a decade or more without a new election. Illegal? No, it's perfectly legit if not perfectly comfortable, because most bylaws say that directors will serve until the next election. The problem is if you don't have a quorum, you can't officially hold an annual meeting — and you definitely can't stage a vote.

At the Surrey Strathmore, the solution came from a novel source: online voting. The board members, says treasurer Allison Keilman, were sitting around "just brainstorming about improving attendance, addressing responses to [a recent] survey [and] I pitched the idea of online voting."

When she was in college at the University of Virginia, her sorority, Sigma Kappa, used online voting to sort out issues in the house. It was easy to use, anonymous and secure. What if the Surrey Strathmore did the same?

Her fellow board members were intrigued, but they wanted to know: How would it work? What would it cost? Who would oversee it? "There were some concerns in how we would actually follow through," Keilman recalls. "Obviously, as board members we can't be running an election." The selling point was ultimately Keilman's observation that online voting would appeal to the younger shareholders, people who needed to be integrated into the life of the co-op but were busy with jobs.

After getting the go-ahead from her fellow co-op board members to pursue the matter, Keilman researched websites and found Elections Online. The company, which offers secure, real-time tabulation of votes, seemed like the best option. It was relatively inexpensive and, more importantly, able to weight the voting, since each of the 153 shareholders at the Surrey Strathmore holds a different number of shares.

The company was able to weight the shares per voter and tally up the votes according to how many shares were cast for each candidate. The co-op was charged less than $116 — about seventy-six cents per shareholder vote. The board chose the less expensive option of using the website's e-vote express, rather than hosting the election on the Surrey Strathmore website. The directors thought that using the company website "would have [fewer] glitches," says Keilman. The board then turned to its attorney and bookkeeper to handle the details.

An Aye for an Aye

The cooperative's attorney, James Glatthaar, a partner at Bleakley Platt & Schmidt, was just as intrigued by the idea of online voting as was the board — it was an answer to the annual meeting morass that "just seemed so obvious, once you thought of it." Glatthaar says boards have the authority to use the technique.

"The whole process went very smoothly," says Glatthaar. About a month before the meeting, the attorney sent each shareholder a letter. It included the notice of the annual meeting, the general proxy, and directions on how to vote online. The directions said, in part, that

• "each shareholder can log onto the website as frequently as they [sic] wish. The Surrey ballot and biographies will be posted on the website: www.electionsonline.com/election. Each shareholder will have their [sic] own password which will allow them to cast ballots for directors... The password is valid for only one use, so a shareholder can log on as many times as they [sic] want, but can cast one ballot for up to seven candidates."

The website would be open for voting a week before the annual meeting and close the morning after, to give everyone ample opportunity to participate. There was also an option that allowed for write-in candidates.

The success of the new system was proved when the board held the first shareholder meeting in three years to actually have a quorum. By the time it started, 50 of the 153 shareholders had already voted online. There were 40 shareholders in the auditorium that evening.

The evening flew by. After a brief statement by Glatthaar, followed by comments from the board president and the treasurer, there was a vote to waive the reading of the minutes from the 2006 meeting, the last official gathering of the shareholders. In addition, all of the candidates waived their rights to discuss their candidacies (since their resumes were online). Then, after two questions from the audience, the annual meeting was over.

Next page: How did the shareholders themselves take it? >>