HOA Election Software for Self-Managed Boards
Run a board election end to end — one ballot per unit, secret ballots, live quorum tracking, and results your board can defend. No per-unit fee, no per-election fee, and no ballot lost to a spam folder.
Board Elections is included on every plan, including the free one. Not a paid add-on.
Most self-managed HOA elections fail on logistics, not on votes
A volunteer board running an annual election usually has three tools: a spreadsheet of owners, an email account, and a folder of paper ballots. The failure modes are predictable. The roster is a list of people rather than a list of units, so nobody is certain how many votes exist. Ballots go out by BCC and some land in spam. Quorum is counted by hand the night of the meeting, and comes up short.
Then the awkward part. A homeowner asks how the count was verified, or whether their ballot was actually secret, or why the deadline moved. If the answers live in one board member's inbox and a spreadsheet they edited after the fact, the board has no good response — even when the election was run honestly.
Board Elections is built around that problem. Units are the unit of account, not contacts. Quorum is calculated against the units that actually received a ballot. Everything that could change the outcome freezes the moment ballots go out. And the ballots are delivered by the same infrastructure that gets your other notices into the primary inbox.
Where elections get challenged
It starts with a unit registry, not a mailing list
Ballots and quorum belong to units — each lot, home, or address in the association — not to people. Two co-owners are one vote. A homeowner who owns three lots is three votes. A mailing list cannot express that, which is why most spreadsheet elections get the denominator wrong before a single ballot goes out.
Build it in one paste
Paste one unit per line, with an optional address after a comma. Or import a CSV and let column detection find the labels and addresses. Re-pasting a corrected list updates the existing units instead of duplicating them, so fixing a typo does not create a second phantom vote.
Assign owners to their unit
Link contacts to the unit they own. Contacts who have not been assigned to any unit are surfaced in their own section, so nobody quietly falls through. Filtered views with live counts show you units with no contact, units with multiple contacts, and inactive units at a glance.
One ballot holder per unit
When a unit has co-owners, one is designated primary and receives the ballot. The system refuses to make an unsubscribed or invalid address primary — that would silently cost the unit its vote and still count against quorum. The other owners stay on the unit and keep getting announcements.
Units can be marked inactive when a lot is retired or merged. Inactive units are excluded from elections and from the quorum math, but stay in the registry as a record — so next year's board can see what happened without guessing.
How a board election runs
Four stages. The board controls the first two; the system handles the rest.
1. Set up
A single-page accordion — Basics, Quorum, Positions & Candidates, Eligible Units, Review & Launch — that saves as you go. A board can draft it across several sittings without losing work. Multiple seats, multiple candidates per seat, and optional candidate statements. Preview the exact ballot owners will receive.
2. Review & launch
Before anything is sent, the board sees which units will not receive a ballot and why, what that does to the quorum threshold, and a direct link to fix the assignments. The confirm button carries the ballot count, so it cannot be clicked absent-mindedly. Every position must have at least one candidate before launch is allowed.
3. Voting
Ballots are delivered automatically the moment voting opens, so the link an owner receives works right away rather than telling them to come back later. Each ballot is a unique URL — no login, no account, works on any phone. Voters review their choices before submitting and get a confirmation email. One vote per unit, single use.
4. Close & report
The election closes automatically at the deadline and the board receives a summary by email. Full tallies appear per position, with winners marked and ties shown as ties. Export to CSV, or to a print-ready PDF you can attach to the meeting minutes.
Nothing changes after it could affect the outcome
This is the part that matters when a result is questioned. Launching an election creates one tokenized ballot per unit and freezes everything that could move the answer:
- The voter list — which units are eligible, settled before ballots go out.
- The positions and candidates — no seat added, no name removed mid-vote.
- The quorum rule — the threshold cannot be lowered once the board can see it is not being met.
- The ballot type — a secret election cannot become an open one after the fact.
- The result announcement policy — whether results are emailed automatically or held for the board is decided at setup, before anyone knows who won.
These are enforced server-side, not hidden in the interface. A board member with admin access and good intentions still cannot change them, which is exactly the point — it means the board can say so honestly.
Secret ballots, structurally
On a secret ballot, no connection between the vote and the unit that cast it is ever stored. Not in the database, not in an export, not in an admin screen. The board can see that a unit voted — that is what quorum requires — but not what it voted for.
Secrecy is a property of how the data is stored, not a setting that could be toggled off later or a screen that could be accessed with the right permissions. There is nothing to leak because there is nothing recorded.
Open ballots are also available when your governing documents call for a recorded vote. You choose at setup, and the choice is one of the things that freezes at launch.
Quorum tracking that tells you before it costs you
Set quorum as a percentage of units or as a fixed count. It is measured against the units that actually received a ballot — not against a roster number that includes three units with no valid email on file. If the denominator is wrong, the threshold is wrong, and the board finds out at the worst possible moment.
While voting is open, the board sees participation only: how many units have voted and whether quorum has been reached. Vote counts stay hidden so a running tally cannot influence the owners still deciding.
If turnout is short, the board can extend the deadline while voting is still open — capped at 30 days past the original close date, cumulative, so repeated extensions cannot stretch an election indefinitely. Every unit that has not voted is notified of the new deadline automatically. That notice is not optional, and the extension count and original deadline appear permanently on the results page.
When quorum is not met
The election does not pretend otherwise. No winners are marked. The counts are labeled as a record rather than an outcome, and the board is pointed toward the governing documents — many associations permit a reconvened meeting at a reduced quorum, and most volunteer boards do not know that until someone tells them.
A follow-up election clones the positions and candidates into a fresh draft, so the board is not retyping candidate statements at 10pm. The failed election stays untouched as a record of what happened.
Announcing results
Every unit that got a ballot gets the outcome
Quorum status and the counts per position, emailed to every unit that received a ballot. Whether that sends automatically at close or waits for the board to release it is decided at setup — before anyone knows the result, which is the only honest time to decide it.
Sent once, not recallable
The announcement goes out one time. It is not editable and not recallable afterward. There is no version of the result that gets quietly revised, which means the copy in a homeowner's inbox is the copy of record.
Non-voters are told they did not vote
Units that did not cast a ballot are told so, with a note that every unit counts toward quorum. It is the single most effective thing you can do to improve turnout next year, and it costs the board nothing.
Results export to CSV for your records and to a print-ready PDF suitable for attaching to meeting minutes. Ties are shown as ties rather than resolved silently — how a tie is broken is a governing-documents question, not a software question.
A ballot in a spam folder is a unit that did not vote
Every part of an election runs on email — the ballot, the reminder, the extension notice, the result. Which means an election is only as good as its delivery. A board can build a perfect unit registry and set an achievable quorum, and still fall short because forty ballots went to the Promotions tab.
Formtabulous sends through Amazon SES with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication, and delivers each ballot as an individually addressed message rather than a marketing campaign. That is why HOA mail from Formtabulous lands in the primary inbox — and it is the reason the election tool is worth using even if you are already happy with your current voting method.
Bounced and unsubscribed addresses are handled before they become a quorum problem: the registry will not let you make an undeliverable address a unit's primary contact, and the pre-launch review shows you every unit that would go uncovered. Read more about HOA email deliverability →
The email an election sends
- Ballot, one per unit, at open
- Confirmation after each vote
- Deadline extension notice to non-voters
- Board summary at close
- Result announcement to every ballot holder
How self-managed boards usually run elections
Most boards choose between paper ballots, a general survey tool, or a full HOA management platform. Here is what each actually gives you.
| Formtabulous | Paper ballots | Survey tools Google Forms / SurveyMonkey |
HOA platforms PayHOA / Condo Control |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One vote per unit, enforced | ✓ | Manual | ✗ | Varies |
| Live quorum tracking | ✓ | ✗ Counted by hand | ✗ | Varies |
| Secret ballot with no stored link | ✓ Structural | ✓ | ✗ | Varies |
| Voter list frozen at launch | ✓ Server-side | By convention | ✗ | Varies |
| Tallies hidden while voting is open | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ Visible to owner | Varies |
| Capped, logged deadline extensions | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| No account or login to vote | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ Portal login |
| Result export for minutes | ✓ CSV + PDF | Handwritten | CSV only | ✓ |
| Proxy voting | Not included | ✓ | ✗ | Varies |
| Cost | Included, from $0 | Printing + postage | Free tier, then $25+/mo | $49–$58/mo |
Competitor pricing and feature availability change; verify against each vendor's current pricing page before making a decision. Cells marked "Varies" reflect features that appear on some tiers but not others.
What it does not do
We would rather tell you now than after you have imported your roster.
- No proxy voting. Board Elections handles direct electronic ballots only. If your governing documents require proxies, you will need to collect and count those separately.
- No weighted voting. Every unit carries one equal vote. Associations that allocate votes by lot size or percentage interest are not supported.
- No paper ballot reconciliation. There is no mechanism to merge mailed-in paper ballots into an electronic tally.
- No inspector of election workflow. Some states and governing documents require an independent inspector to receive and count ballots. Formtabulous does not implement that role.
Before you run a binding election
Whether an HOA may vote electronically depends on your state and on your association's own governing documents, and the rules have been changing. Several states have authorized electronic voting for community associations, generally with conditions around owner consent and ballot secrecy. Others specify balloting procedures that an electronic system may not satisfy on its own.
Formtabulous provides the mechanics, not a legal opinion. We do not offer legal advice and we do not claim that using Board Elections makes your election compliant in any particular jurisdiction. Read your CC&Rs and bylaws, check your state's statute, and confirm the method with your association attorney before running an election whose outcome has to hold up.
Elections are included, not an add-on
Board Elections is on every Formtabulous plan, including the free one. There is no per-unit fee, no per-election fee, and no upgrade required to unlock voting. That is the same rule as everything else here: capacity is the only difference between plans.
The one thing to plan for is volume. Ballots, reminders, extension notices, and result announcements are all emails, so they draw on your monthly message allowance. A rough guide: an election in a 150-unit association uses somewhere between 300 and 450 messages across the whole cycle. The board is warned before launch if the allowance will not cover the ballots — not after.
Most associations running one annual election plus regular announcements sit comfortably on Starter at $5/month. The free plan's 100 messages will cover a small association's election but leaves little room for the rest of the year.
No per-unit pricing on any plan. See full pricing →
Frequently Asked Questions
Set up your unit registry before election season
The registry is the part that takes an afternoon, and it is the part every board wishes it had done in March instead of the week before the annual meeting. Paste your unit list, assign owners, and the election itself is a twenty-minute job whenever you are ready for it.
Also sending meeting notices and newsletters? That is GroupPost — same account, same plan, no extra cost.
