Run HOA Votes Without the Paper Ballots
Free for 50 Properties. No Credit Card Required.
Tuesday night meeting. The board has to vote on raising dues 4 percent. Three of seven members made it in person. Two are on speakerphone. One sent a hand-signed proxy by text. The seventh forgot. Someone scribbles “4 yes, 1 no, 2 abstain” on a yellow legal pad and slides it into a binder. Six months later a homeowner sues, claiming quorum was never reached and the dues hike is invalid. You go looking for that legal pad. Good luck.
HomeHerald Community Voting is the HOA voting software that ends this kind of chaos. Open a vote in 60 seconds. Eligible voters cast Yes, No, or Abstain from their phone. Ballots carry the voter’s name and a timestamp. The tally is computed instantly. The audit is one click away as a printable PDF.
Two vote types. One audit-grade record. Free for up to 50 properties.
Why HOA Voting Is Broken Today
The Community Associations Institute estimates 369,000 community associations house roughly 77 million Americans. Most of them still vote with paper ballots, in-person headcounts, hand-signed proxies, and minute-takers writing “motion carried” on a notepad.
That worked when “the community” meant a dozen people in a clubhouse. It does not work when:
- Your residents have full-time jobs and cannot make a Tuesday meeting
- Your board is debating something with real money attached
- A homeowner challenges the vote later and you have nothing to show
- You need to prove who voted, when, and how
The problem is not the people. The problem is the medium. Paper does not timestamp itself. A show of hands does not survive litigation. A signed proxy does not tell you whether the proxy holder actually cast the ballot.
HOAs need votes that are easy to run, hard to dispute, and trivial to recall. That is what HomeHerald Community Voting is built for.
How Community Voting Works
Community Voting lives on the admin Dashboard, right next to Announcements. One tile. Two choices.
Two vote types, never combined
Community Wide votes. One ballot per property, cast by the primary resident on file. This is for things every owner gets a say on: dues changes, rule amendments, board elections, capital projects.
Board Only votes. One ballot per active board seat, plus admins (your property manager or community manager). This is for everything the board decides on the community’s behalf: vendor contracts, budget approvals, hiring, formal resolutions.
The two scopes are mutually exclusive. A community-wide vote tallies one ballot per property regardless of whether the resident is also a board member. A board vote tallies one ballot per board seat regardless of which property the member lives in. There is no ballot-stacking and no math to second-guess.
The eligible voter list is locked at open
When you click “Save and Open Now,” the system snapshots the eligibility list at that moment. Every active board member’s user ID. Every property’s primary resident ID. That snapshot is what the tally is computed against. If a resident moves out mid-vote or a new board member joins three days later, the snapshot does not shift. Your tally is anchored to the moment the vote opened, which means nobody can argue eligibility shifted under their feet.
Yes, No, Abstain. That is it.
Every vote in HomeHerald has the same three choices: Yes, No, Abstain. Not because we are short on imagination, but because almost every motion that matters in an HOA is a yes-or-no question, and abstain is the legally significant third option that lets a board member recuse themselves on a conflict of interest. Multi-choice elections are on the roadmap. The current focus is the resolution-style vote that runs HOA business 95 percent of the time.
The Audit Trail Nobody Asks About Until They Need It
Every ballot in HomeHerald carries:
- The voter’s name and email at the time they cast
- The property address (community-wide votes) or board title (board votes)
- The choice
- An ISO timestamp accurate to the second
These ballot records are immutable. The Cloud Function that writes them uses a transactional doc create with the voter ID as the document key, so a duplicate cast collides on the doc itself instead of racing against itself. You cannot accidentally cast twice. You cannot edit a ballot after submission.
When you open the audit panel inside HomeHerald, you see a table of every ballot with name, identifier, choice chip, and timestamp. The “Download Audit (PDF)” button generates a multi-page document with your community letterhead, the vote metadata, the full tally, and the ballot list. Page footers carry the generated time and page numbering. That PDF is what you hand to a lawyer, file with your insurer, or attach to your meeting minutes.
The ballot-level audit is visible to admins and board members. The published tally is visible to the audience that cast the vote. Both surfaces use the same underlying data, so there is no chance of drift between what residents see in their feed and what the audit shows.
The 7-Day Resident Result Banner
When a vote closes, the tally is frozen and the system pins a results banner to the top of every eligible viewer’s home screen for 7 days.
For community-wide votes, the banner is public to every resident. Yes percentage, No percentage, Abstain percentage, turnout (how many of the eligible properties responded), and a clear “X days left” countdown showing exactly when the banner will auto-clear. Residents can dismiss the banner manually if they have already seen it; the dismissal persists in their browser so reloads do not bring it back.
For board-only votes, the admin chooses at create time whether the result is public to all residents or restricted to board and admin. This is the “Make results public to all residents” checkbox in the create form. Public board votes work just like community-wide votes: every resident sees the resolution. Restricted board votes show the tally only to board members and admins. The ballot-level audit (who voted what) stays restricted to board and admin in either case.
This means a board can vote internally on personnel and keep that quiet, then turn around and vote on a dues change with the result published to the community. One feature, both modes, no copy-paste between systems.
AI Recall: Residents Can Ask About Past Resolutions
Closed votes feed directly into Herald Chat, the AI assistant built into HomeHerald. The most recent 20 closed votes (filtered by the same visibility rules as the resident banner) are available in the chat’s context.
A resident can open Herald Chat and ask “What was the result of the dues vote?” and get a real answer with the tally and turnout. They can ask “Did the pool repair vote pass?” or “What did the board decide about the new gate?” and the assistant pulls the closed-vote record. Restricted board votes are filtered out of the chat for residents who would not see them on the dashboard, so the AI never leaks a vote a person should not see.
Net effect: your community has institutional memory that does not depend on your ability to remember which Tuesday in March the vote happened.
What HomeHerald Voting Is NOT in v1
We made some specific choices about scope. Knowing what we left out is as important as knowing what we shipped.
No quorum logic. The system records ballots and computes a tally. It does not declare a vote “valid” or “invalid” based on a percentage threshold. Quorum is a governance question; we leave the decision to the humans who run the meeting. The tally and turnout percentage are right there for you to apply your bylaws.
No tie-breaking rules. If a community-wide vote ties, we show “50 percent Yes, 50 percent No.” We do not auto-declare a winner. Your bylaws or your board chair break the tie.
No proxy votes. A resident cannot cast on behalf of another resident in v1. The primary on file casts the ballot. Co-residents in the same household do not get a separate ballot.
No multi-choice elections. Yes / No / Abstain only. Multi-candidate board elections will come in a future release.
No anonymous ballots. Every cast carries the voter’s name. This is intentional. HOA case law strongly favors transparent records, and most disputes turn on whether the vote can be reconstructed after the fact. Anonymous voting is on the roadmap as an opt-in for specific use cases, but the default is and will remain audit-grade.
These constraints are what make the audit trail trustworthy. Add the missing pieces and the audit gets weaker. We will add them when we can keep the audit just as strong.
Setup Time: 60 Seconds Per Vote
Click the Community Voting tile on the Dashboard. Pick Start a new vote. Choose Board Only or Community Wide. Type a title and the motion text. Pick a close date. Click Save and Open Now. Done.
Eligible voters see a banner at the top of their dashboard within seconds. They tap, read the motion, pick Yes / No / Abstain, and submit. You watch the tally update live in the admin Votes panel. At the close date the system freezes the tally automatically (or you can close it manually any time). The 7-day resident result banner appears immediately. The audit PDF is one click away.
There is no separate voting platform to log into, no third-party ballot service to integrate, and no postage. The same residents who already use HomeHerald for dues and amenity bookings vote in the same app.
Built for Self-Managed and Professionally Managed HOAs
HomeHerald Community Voting works the same whether your community is run by volunteers or by a property management company. Admins (typically the manager) are included in board votes by default, since they are part of the governing body in most professionally managed associations. If your bylaws restrict voting to elected board members only, the admin can opt out by simply not casting their ballot. The audit trail records who did and did not vote, so abstention by silence is just as visible as an explicit Abstain.
For self-managed boards, this is one of the simplest ways to retire the legal pad. For managed communities, it is a clean handoff: the manager runs the meeting, opens the vote, and the board casts ballots on their phones in real time.
Pricing
Community Voting is included in every HomeHerald plan, including the Free tier (up to 50 properties). There is no per-vote charge, no per-ballot charge, and no additional add-on. If your HOA is on HomeHerald, your HOA can vote.
Free for 50 properties. No credit card. Cancel any time.