OPA staff should NOT be involved in such election issues.

I highly respect and trust Carol Ludwig and in no way have I ever mentioned her name as stated in the Progress.

I trust Ludwig as well. However, the fact remains that her committee made a serious error in not counting all lots that voted via paper. Not intentional, just plain old human error.

There are still many unanswered questions being raised by some of the current board members about the lack of transparency in the election totals specifically in the area of Multiple Lot Owners which should be very easy to answer.

There is only one unanswered question of any import. Frank Daly keeps asking it. How many lots voted in the last election? We do not know, but we could know. The board majority will not do what is required to determine how many valid lots were not counted because it could very well produce questions as to who actually won the third open seat, and thus who controls the board.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure Daly even understands the issue of uncounted paper votes. The Progress quotes him as wanting to review envelopes as a means to insure no one voted both on paper and on the internet. Truly sad when our elected board is virtually blind to the serious, very possibly result-changing mistake made by the election committee last year.

The Progress reports you will be given access to the returned envelopes for the paper ballots. Each envelope has a code. That code can be used to determine how many lots were represented by the single ballot in the envelope. You would do the community a great service by pushing this to some conclusion where the mailing contractor or the Election Committee was charged with checking the return envelopes.

This is really simple to understand via the following example:

Let's assume 8000 lots were owned by one person. In the last election, the owner of 8000 lots would have received a ballot package with a return envelope and a single ballot. If that owner had voted via the INTERNET, we might suspect the candidate votes for all 8000 lots were properly counted, but actually there is no way to verify an INTERNET vote with no PAPER to check.

However, if that owner of 8000 lots returned his single ballot in the return envelope, only ONE lot would have been counted. 7999 lots would have been uncounted.

The election committee's error was not determining how many lots every single ballot represented and counting each paper ballot as one lot, regardless of how many lots were represented. 200 or so lots could have been uncounted in a board position decided by 13 votes.

The board has known this for a long time. It is foolhardy to think this current board majority would want to verify the number of lots casting votes via paper as doing so could indicate the third-place finisher could very well have been in fourth place, and we would be seeing an entirely different board majority control had the election ballots been properly counted.

Most people are saying nothing is going to change the election result. They are likely correct, but I believe Tom Stauss in the Progress quoted OPA attorney Jeremy Tucker as suggesting a judge might order a new election.

What happened last year was a disgrace. The board's refusal to truly address what happened and produce a count of how many lots were not counted is even more disgraceful.