A message from APNA Vice President Liz Burden:
Dear Armory Parkers,
Apologies for the long post. If you are APNA member, please read the post in its entirety. (If you are not an APNA member but are interested in how we will be conducting the upcoming elections, please feel free to read.
Regards,
Liz Burden
Information About Upcoming Annual Meeting and Board Election
Forced by the pandemic, our neighborhood association is moving further into the realm of the internet. Our annual meeting on November 9 will be on Zoom (agenda and link coming soon). Since we do our board elections as part of the annual meeting, this year we will have to have a new way of voting. In a nutshell, we will be voting using an online, secure, user-friendly program called Election Buddy that allows for anonymous voting with a record of the vote.
By November 4, voting APNA members will receive an email with voting instructions, their unique voter ID and access key, and individualized voting link. In summary, the election process will be as follows:
- At the annual meeting, per our bylaws, the Elections Committee will present a slate of candidates for the four officers of the Board.
- Nominations from the floor will be called for and accepted. After a motion to close nominations is passed and floor nominations are added, the Election Buddy ballot will be opened, and voting will begin.
- Using the emailed link, members will be able to complete the ballot, review their selections, and then submit their vote. The submitted ballots are automatically counted, and an email is sent to notify that the vote was received.
- An email reminder will be sent to all eligible members notifying them that voting is underway. with the individualized link to the online ballot on Election Buddy.
- Voting members will have three days to vote. The election will close on Friday, November 12 at 11:59 pm.
- Election results will be emailed directly from Election Buddy to voting members. It will also be posted for the neighborhood on the APNA Google Group.
The system is designed so the site administrators will see grand totals of the vote and who voted. Each individual vote is anonymous; the system does not allow the administrators to see the completed individual ballots, and email address privacy is preserved throughout.
Election Buddy also has provisions for those who do not have an email address or online access. For those voting members, a printed letter with voting instructions along with a paper ballot will be delivered to their address.
All systems have potential glitches, so if you have any problems, please contact Ken Taylor at tech@armoryparktucson.org. In particular, if you as an eligible voter do not receive your email notice about the election from Election Buddy by November 4, please email tech@armoryparktucson.org so we can straighten it out and get you the ballot to which you are entitled.
A key issue: If you have signed up for membership as a couple with only one email address, we will need a separate email address for each person. The program’s protection against individuals voting more than once is that each email is restricted to one ballot. We can’t change that. So we need to have one email address for each voter.
This process differs from how we have done elections in the past. It was developed to reflect our continuing use of virtual meetings to safeguard everyones’ health. In some ways, it is an improvement of the election process: Rather than only those present at the meeting being able to vote, all voting members will have a chance to participate in the vote. As noted above, in the tradition of all well run elections, it is a secret ballot.
To restate: Online ballots will open on November 9 after nominations close. Voting members will have three days to vote. The election will close at 11:59 pm on Friday, November 12. The results will then be announced to members via email from Election Buddy and on the APNA Google Group.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Burden, Vice President and Ken Taylor, APNA Technical Support
The Elections Technical Committee
Armory Park Neighborhood Association 