The treasurer’s name was the one I recognized. She had been the woman who sat beside the developer at the closing when I bought my house, and she’d been on the association board for years. I called her and asked why seventy-seven people had apparently given her proxies when nine of them said they’d never even heard of one. She told me the proxies had been collected by the association’s management company and that she wasn’t responsible for what homeowners signed. I asked her why every form had the same handwriting in the date section and the same printed name underneath the signature line. She said she didn’t know. Then I asked her about the blank proxies from closing, and there was a long silence before she said those had been “general authorization forms” and weren’t supposed to be used for association votes.
I requested the original meeting packet, including the attendance sheet, the ballots, and every proxy that had been counted toward the quorum. The clerk sent me copies, but the originals were still at the lawyer’s office. I drove there the next morning. The attorney looked at the documents for less than a minute before asking me where I’d gotten them. I told him the association had provided them. He said they couldn’t have, because the originals in his file didn’t match the copies I was holding. On the originals, only fourteen people were marked as present, exactly as I remembered. There were no seventy-seven proxies attached to the meeting minutes. Instead, there was a separate envelope containing blank proxy forms from the original property closings, and every one of them had been signed years earlier. The attorney told me those forms had been kept by the developer’s office and were never supposed to leave the closing files.
Then he pulled out one final document and put it in front of me. It was an amendment to the association bylaws filed three weeks before the meeting, changing the rules so that a proxy could be used for any assessment vote without the homeowner being notified of the amount beforehand. I asked who had authorized the amendment. He said the filing showed it had been approved by the same ninety-one votes listed in the meeting minutes. Ninety-one votes from a room that held sixty people. I looked at the signature page and recognized several names immediately, including two homeowners who had died years earlier. But the name that stopped me was at the bottom, because it wasn’t a homeowner at all. It was the developer’s office manager — the same woman who had become the association treasurer, and whose signature appeared on every one of the seventy-seven proxies.
