In its lobbying efforts, and other propaganda efforts to promote the acceptance and support of planned communities with homeowners associations, Community Associations Institute, CAI, has made use of models of representative democracy generally known as voting “delegate systems”. Simply stated, HOA members vote for their “representative” or delegate in their “district”, which is some predefined neighborhood. The delegate gets to vote in place of the homeowner-member on issues requiring a membership vote.
The problem is, these delegates have no real powers because the Declaration of CC&Rs determines who is responsible for the operation of the HOA form of governance, and that is the Board of Directors. And we all know that the CC&RS are not modeled after the US Constitution, Declaration of Independence, or contain any Bill of Rights protections, or on the principles of the social contract, or on John Locke’s The Second Treatise of Government. No, the 1964 marketing plan for planned developments, as we know them today, was the Urban Land Institute’s Homes Association Handbook, TB#50,[1] that was based on profit motives for the real estate interests.
This illusion of democracy at work reminds one of the “people’s democracies” where the people vote for their representatives who possess very little real power, and are subject to a Central Committee, or to Commissars, who control the government. The HOA form of governance is not the product of attempts to produce a more perfect government than our current form of democratic government, but is the adoption of the top-down corporate model of governance with the board of directors in control for all practical considerations.[2]
HOA Constitutional Government 