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ELECTRONIC VOTING – AN IDEA OF
NUTCASES?
By
Jan Bergemann
Published
August 14, 2015
Everybody involved in community associations is trying to find
ways to make this new law work. Guess what: So far no solutions
– not even close.
The biggest problem: In order to make electronic voting work in
daily life happen there has to be a program for the computer
that would fulfill all the requirements of the law.
See for example
FS 720.317 – ELECTRONIC VOTING (The wording in the other
community association statutes are about the same). This law
requires lots of provisions that are meant to protect the
ability to create secret ballots, but still enabling the folks
in charge of the election to authenticate the validity of each
electronic vote and store these votes for future references.
The problem: No such computer program seems to exist, but maybe
Representative Fitzenhagen and her husband attorney Richard
DeBoest, who pushed this electronic voting provision, have a
secret ace up their sleeves and know where to find such a
computer program at a reasonable cost?
Or was this provision just “made up” to create some more
business for the law firm – business in form of billing hours?
Let’s see what happens when the first arbitration filings
regarding electronic voting will hit the Division – and nobody
knows how to deal with it.
You want to laugh?
A smart attorney already claims that he initiated electronic
voting in a homeowners’ association by a vote that took place by
eBallot. Shouldn’t there be a resolution first, before using
eBallots? That’s minimum how I read the provision in the
statute. But I guess that some attorneys have the ability to
come up with some special interpretation of the laws – far
superior to us normal human beings!
Having fun yet?
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Jan Bergemann is president of Cyber Citizens For Justice,
Florida
's largest state-wide property owners' advocacy group.
CCFJ works on legislation to help owners living in
community
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associations. He moved to
Florida
in 1995 - hoping to retire. He moved into a HOA, where the
developer cheated the homeowners and used the association dues
for his own purposes. End of retirement!
CCFJ was born in the year 2000, when some owners met in
Tallahassee
- finding out that power is only in numbers. Bergemann was a
member of Governor Jeb Bush's HOA Task force in 2003/2004.
The organization has two websites to inform interested
Florida
homeowners and condo owners:
News Website: http://www.ccfj.net/.
Educational Website: http://www.ccfjfoundation.net/.
We think that only owners can really represent owners, since all
service providers surely have a different interest! We are
trying to create owner-friendly laws, but the best laws are
useless without enforcement. And enforcement is totally lacking
in
Florida
!
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