The MXB Wire has retracted the article, Election 2020: Green Party Makes Advances at the Expense of the Proponents of the Rental Tax, after receiving information from a number of former board members (i.e., more than two and less than eight) into election tampering and in particular a scheme otherwise known as ballot harvesting. This service now believes that it is possible (a number of people report likely) that given this practice has happened pervasively in the past, the election results may have been skewed in err due to the fact that one or several persons in authority tampered with the ballots of owners either directly or indirectly through third parties and have resubmitted these ballots with their own selections. [1]

If the accounts and allegations are true and if this historical practice is ongoing, the election results more reflect the will of the person or persons in authority who acted either directly or indirectly through third parties to effectively rig the election in favor of a set of preferred candidates as opposed to advancing the will of the community members. The votes of the community members then may have had little to no bearing on the results of the election.

If the accounts and allegations are true and if this historical practice is ongoing, in effect a number of ballots where selections for candidates for office were cast, these selections could have been comingled with the selections of the person or persons in authority, fraudulently adding votes to candidates that were not the intention of the person who originally cast the ballot.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the accounts of the former board members is that due to the legal language in the first paragraph of the proxy ballot, it is legal for a member of the board, e.g., a person in authority, to alter the candidate selections on the ballot either directly or indirectly through a third party, in this case lawyers for the property management firm, to reflect the will of the person in authority and not necessarily that of the person who originally cast the ballot.

According to emerging information from reliable sources who confirm each other's accounts, I am included in the list of owners whose ballots may have potentially been hijacked as I left the field in the first paragraph of my ballot blank. [2]

Given the secrecy of the election process, given the fact that the process is never properly audited, given the ballot is rife with legal speak, given the fact that the board never releases the vote totals of the candidates, given the fact that past presidents reportedly have a history of submitting significant numbers of absentee ballots with their own picks for board positions, given the 2020 election and the ones in prior years that saw more candidates than open board positions, the entire election process is suspect.

It is the opinion of this service that the board needs to act decisively to instill confidence in the community's election process; that the process is fair and ethical and to be conducted with as much transparency as possible. In particular the board now needs to be frank with the community as to how many proxy ballots a person of authority has cast on behalf of another owner, how many of these ballots were tampered with and who the person of authority selected for board positions using another owner's ballot.

This is now a developing story.

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