Elections Committee has done its due diligence

Notwithstanding some unnecessarily harsh and unfair criticism by certain members of the Board of Directors, the Ocean Pines Association’s Elections Committee has performed admirably in its deep dive of what went wrong with last summer’s Board election and in its recommendations on how to avoid similar problems in this summer’s balloting.

While reasonable people can disagree on the merits of eliminating electronic voting this summer, one of if not the key recommendation of the committee, to fault the panel for not doing the job tasked to it is unacceptable hyperbole and an insult to the hard work of appointed volunteers.

Director Colette Horn’s critique was egregiously over the top and factually wrong. Here’s what she said during Board discussion of committee’s latest report:

“What we asked to have done was not done by this committee.”

She contended that the Board asked the committee to look at all of the sources of voting, determine where the errors were, and what could be done to prevent them from happening again.

“We got nothing,” she said. “I’ve lost confidence in this committee.”

She said the Board should look at the composition of the Elections Committee to make sure it has the “correct” people on the committee.

A better idea is a deep dive into the composition of the Board of Directors to determine whether the “correct” people are serving.

In its most recent report to the Board, the committee did a thorough, commendable job explaining where the errors were and what can be done to avoid similar problems this summer. The errors were well known even before the current members of the committee were appointed, after the former committee resigned en masse. The new committee essentially confirmed what should be known by anyone paying attention as the election and its aftermath unfolded.

Simply point, the scanning equipment malfunctioned, resulted in an initial election result that produced more votes than what could have been produced by the number of participating lots. This result was fixed by a subsequent handcount, in which the number of votes cast were well under the number of votes that could have been cast by the number of lots whose owners participated in the election.

The old committee provided this explanation in its reports last year and it was confirmed by the new committee in its latest report.

The committee’s report detailed the reasons for the malfunctioning scanner, from the wrong kind of paper to software glitches. This isn’t rocket science.

Then there was the issue of owners of multiple lots not receiving ballots matching the number of lots owned.

This problem was identified even before last summer’s election was concluded, and it’s easily fixed.

It will be. A ballot will be sent to every lot in Ocean Pines whose owner is a member of the OPA in good standing. Again, this isn’t complicated.

It’s not crystal clear what Horn meant when she contended that the committee had not looked at all the sources of voting.

It’s hard to imagine the committee doing anymore than analyzing paper ballots that were initially scanned and then hand counted, and the category of ballots that were cast electronically. These are the only conceivable “sources” of voting in Ocean Pines elections, as no one has seriously alleged ballot box stuffing by non-members or widespread hacking by Nigerian nationals.

This particular criticism is nonsensical.

Director Steve Jacobs echoed Horn’s unfair allegations about whether a “deep dive” had been conducted -- it was, at least as “deep” as it needed to be. But his more substantive criticism suggested that the committee had created a “new controversy” by advocating for the elimination of electronic voting at least for this summer.

As controversies go, this is a tepid one. Support for eliminating e-voting, whether temporarily for this coming summer only or permanently, surfaced after problems with last summer’s voting manifested.

Moreover, there was sentiment in the community in opposition to e-voting well before the prior Board voted to adopt it for the 2022 election. Check out the Ocean Pines Forum Website for confirmation.

But Jacobs’ cogent support for continuing e-voting in some form or another represents fair comment and is a legitimate issue for debate. As Jacobs and other supporters of e-voting content point out, last summer’s controversial election did not allege any substantive allegations that the e-voting system malfunctioned. True, some owners were confused by the “weighting” of ballots cast by owners of multiple properties, and some owners would have preferred, and subsequently asked for, one ballot for every lot owned.

This was not so much an issue of malfunctioning equipment as it was of poor communication to voters, and perhaps a poorly thought-out decision to employ “weighting” of ballots.

But this could be easily fixed simply by restricting e-voting to owners of single lots only, with owners of multiple lots participating in traditional voting by paper ballots.

This idea has been debated by the Elections Committee, but in the end discarded in part because no good solution has been found for producing an e-vote paper trail in the unlikely event of a request for a recount.

The software for that is elusive as is a vendor who might be able to find a solution.

The committee is also wary of the degree of communication necessary between the local vendor that handles paper ballots and the on-line vendor who accepts and then counts ballots submitted electronically.

Here the issue is ensuring that OPA members don’t try to vote more than once.