Analysis of the Voting for 2018 Board Members

Because our voting system at The Elizabeth is a weighted vote such that the square footage of one's property and how high up the unit is located increases your points, it is hard to understand what the published percentage of the vote means. This year the six candidates, running for four positions on the Board, got these percentage points:

Winning Candidates
Wemple: 44.80
Schwartz: 44.34
Dehejia: 43.57
Taller: 40.82

Other Candidates
Schattman: 24.15
Bressler: 22.39

Because these numbers do not add up to 100%, we are fortunate to have Jim Jones translating these numbers.  Here is his pie chart which shows how the voting relates across the entire Association and in relation to the concept of one hundred percent.

What the picture shows is the majority of those voting supported the Board of Directors we already had since three of the winners had already been working Board members. This was not a close count for any of the candidates elected to the Board.

What is disturbing is that nearly 45% of the Association cast no vote at all. Owning property in Chevy Chase is no small investment. What elected Board members decide on behalf of the Association can make or break our property values as we saw when our reserve fund was spent down with Board approval.

Note: The 232 ballots cast includes parking spaces that are not counted in apartment ownership. This count does not figure in how Jim calculated the pie chart.

Jim  has also provided a graph showing Association member voting abstention rates from 2002 to 2018.

What this chart shows is that more votes were cast in 2009 than any other year during this 16 year period. What the downward trend (as documented by the red line) in Association members NOT voting might mean is that we have more rentals in the building and some of the owners of those rented units may be investors as opposed to people who formerly lived here or who intend to live here in the future. Off-site owners typically make little effort to vote.