Why the RA Board Elections will probably head to the Courts

An anonymous commenter on Restonian.org said:

“if those 6 are allowed to vote now why not some of the other 15,000+ that didn’t vote either?”

My answer is: Because they didn’t attempt to vote and have their vote messed up by Cvent and subsequently deleted.

I sat in the meeting the other night, and have read through the documents provided by RA Counsel. Honestly it doesn’t appear that the By-Laws cover this instance, the only section I see that applies is the Appeal process which states that if a candidate is aggrieved by a decision of the election committee or Secretary or Assistant Secretary, they may appeal the decision within 10 days of the decision. Mr Greenberg has made such an appeal. The By-laws state that an appeals panel made up of all directors who are not candidates in the election in question, shall promptly consider the appeal, and a majority of the panel shall constitute a quorum.

I think the problem arises out of the state statutes. Here is the section of the code that the RA legal counsel provided at the meeting:

The code says that no ballot, proxies or votes, nor any revocations thereof or changes thereto shall be accepted by the inspectors after the closing of the polls unless the circuit court of the city or county shall determine otherwise.

Similar to the hanging chads in Florida, the court is going to have to say “go back and get those 6 votes” before it is actually going to happen.

It’s just a shame how poorly mismanaged this process was handled. These 24 households that experienced the glitch should have been directly contacted in a verifiable manor and the elections staff should have made sure that the votes they did cast for the at-large position counted, and that they had the opportunity to specifically vote or not vote in the Northpoint election that they were entitled to vote in but were not given the option when they placed their online votes.

Since they were not effectively contacted during the election process and RA is bound by the law not to accept new ballots after the election without the court saying so, the issue is closed until a civil case is filed.