Davis-Stirling Act Election Requirements for California HOAs

Many association member votes must be run as secret-ballot elections. Knowing whether your vote falls in that group determines how much lead time, documentation, and ballot handling your election needs.

In plain English: if the association is asking members to vote on directors, a recall, an amendment to the governing documents, an assessment increase that requires member approval, or granting exclusive use of common area, that vote has to be run as a secret-ballot election. It cannot be a show of hands at a meeting, and it cannot be a signature sheet passed around the clubhouse.

"Secret ballot" has a specific mechanical meaning. Each member gets a ballot with no identifying marks, seals it in an inner envelope, places that inside an outer envelope signed with their name and separate interest address, and returns it. The inspector of elections checks the signature and eligibility on the outer envelope, then separates and shuffles the inner envelopes before opening them, so no one can tie a ballot to a voter. Associations that vote electronically achieve the same result through a system that separates the voter's identity from the recorded vote.

The practical consequence is lead time. Because a secret-ballot election requires nomination notices, ballot distribution windows, an independent inspector, and a public count, a compliant director election takes roughly three to four months from the day the board starts. If your annual meeting is 45 days away and nothing has gone out, the honest answer is that the timeline no longer fits and the meeting should be planned around the election rather than the other way around.

• Director elections
• Recall elections
• Governing document amendments
• Assessments where applicable
• Member voting procedures

When nominations close and the candidates do not outnumber the open seats, an association may be able to seat qualified candidates without mailing ballots. That decision changes the rest of your timeline.

Acclamation is the one path that lets an association skip mailing ballots. If, after the nomination period closes, the number of qualified candidates is not more than the number of open seats, the board may vote at an open meeting to seat those candidates without an election. The association must have 6,000 or fewer separate interests and must have held a regular election within the last three years.

The trade-off is that the notice requirements get stricter, not looser. The association has to deliver individual notice of the nomination procedure and the deadline at least 90 days before the nomination deadline, then a reminder notice between 7 and 30 days before that deadline listing the names of anyone who has already been nominated. Each nominee must be told individually whether they qualified, and anyone disqualified has to be given the reason and an opportunity to use internal dispute resolution.

This is where most acclamation attempts fail. Boards decide in week six that only two people are running for two seats, and then discover that the 90-day individual notice was never sent, which means acclamation is off the table and a full ballot election is required. Plan for acclamation from day one; you lose nothing if the election ends up contested, because the same notices work either way.

• Uncontested elections
• Candidate nomination procedures
• Required conditions
• Election timeline implications
• Governing document considerations

Your adopted election rules control the practical mechanics of the election: who may run, how members vote, and who administers the process. They must be in place well before the first notice goes out.

Election rules are the association's own rulebook for how elections actually run, and §5105 lists what they must cover: how nominations are made and by when, who is qualified to be a candidate, who is qualified to vote, how the inspector is selected, how ballots are delivered and returned, how the count is conducted, and how candidates may access association media and common area meeting space on equal terms.

Two timing rules matter more than the content. Election rules cannot be amended within 90 days before an election, and any adoption or amendment requires a general notice to members at least 28 days before the board votes on it. That means an association that wants new rules in place for a fall annual meeting is really working on a summer deadline.

The statute also limits what the rules may do. Rules cannot disqualify a member from voting for any reason other than the ones the statute allows, and candidate qualifications are constrained: an association may require membership in good standing, may disqualify someone who is delinquent on assessments (subject to a payment-plan exception and an IDR opportunity), may require that co-owners not both serve, and may disqualify a person convicted of a crime that would prevent them from being bonded or from serving. Inventing additional disqualifications is a common and expensive mistake.

• Candidate qualifications
• Nomination procedures
• Voting rights
• Ballot procedures
• Inspector selection
• Election-rule amendments

The Inspector of Elections independently verifies eligibility, handles ballots, counts votes, and certifies the outcome. Even a self-managed election needs a qualified, independent inspector in place early.

The inspector of elections is the neutral party who owns the ballots. The inspector determines the number of memberships entitled to vote, verifies eligibility, receives and holds the sealed ballots, decides ballot challenges, opens and counts the ballots in public, and reports the result to the board. Every association election needs one, or up to three, and the board must appoint them before the process starts.

Independence is the whole point. The inspector cannot be a current director, a candidate, or a person related to a director or candidate, and cannot be someone under contract with the association for other services. Practically, associations choose either a volunteer member with no stake in the outcome, or an outside professional: a CPA, an attorney, a licensed notary, an election company, or the association's managing agent's designated inspector where permitted by the governing documents.

Once appointed, the inspector's custody of the ballots is absolute. Signed outer envelopes and unopened inner envelopes go to the inspector, not to the manager's office or a board member's home, and the inspector keeps them until they are counted in public and turned over to the association as records. If a challenge comes later, an unbroken custody chain is what saves the election.

• Independence
• Voting eligibility
• Ballot challenges
• Ballot counting
• Election certification

Ballots are opened and tabulated in public view, and the outcome is reported to the membership. Plan the counting meeting and the results announcement as scheduled election tasks, not afterthoughts.

Ballots are opened and tabulated by the inspector in public, at a properly noticed meeting of the board or members, and any member may watch. The inspector may use association staff or outside help, but the counting itself cannot happen behind a closed door, in advance, or at a board member's kitchen table.

Once the count is done the inspector reports the tabulated result to the board, and the board records that result in the minutes of the next meeting. The association then has to deliver a general notice of the tabulated results to the membership within 15 days after the election.

If quorum is not met, the meeting can be adjourned to a later date at least 20 days out, and (if the governing documents or election rules allow it) the quorum requirement at that adjourned meeting drops to 20 percent of members casting ballots. Nothing else about the process changes: the same inspector, the same ballots already received, and the same public count.

• Public counting
• Vote tabulation
• Election results
• Reporting results
• Election meeting

Ballots, envelopes, tally sheets, and voter lists become association records after the election. Decide up front who takes custody of them and where they are stored.

After the count, the physical election materials become association records: the ballots, the signed outer envelopes, the voter list, any proxies, and the candidate registration list. They must be preserved for at least one year after the date of the election.

Members have a right to inspect those materials, but the inspection cannot reveal how any individual member voted. That is why the inner envelopes are shuffled before opening and why the returned ballots are stored separately from the signed envelopes: the association has to be able to prove who was eligible and how many ballots were cast without ever being able to link a member to a vote.

Decide custody before the election, not after. Name in writing who holds the sealed materials, where they are stored, and who releases them for an inspection request. If the election is challenged, the first thing anyone asks for is the ballot custody record.

• Ballots
• Election materials
• Custody of records
• Recounts
• Election challenges

Members can challenge an election when required procedures are skipped. Following a documented timeline and keeping clean records is the most practical protection against a disputed outcome.

A member who believes the association violated the election statutes may sue to void the election. The action must be brought within one year of the date the results are announced, and if the court finds a violation it may void the result and order a new election at the association's expense, plus attorney's fees and costs to the prevailing member, and a civil penalty of up to $500 per violation.

The violations that actually get elections voided are almost never exotic. They are missed notice deadlines, a ballot mailed 22 days before the count instead of 30, an inspector who turned out to be the board president's business partner, candidate qualifications applied to one nominee but not another, election rules amended inside the 90-day window, or a count conducted before the meeting.

The defense is documentation. Keep the dated timeline you worked from, copies of every notice with proof of the delivery method and date, the inspector's appointment and independence confirmation, the nomination and disqualification correspondence, and the tabulation record. An association that can hand a judge a dated file usually never gets that far.

• Election violations
• Compliance
• Election disputes
• Recordkeeping
• Importance of following established procedures