DC makes condo virtual meetings and electronic voting permanent
DC makes condo virtual meetings and electronic voting permanent
2026-09-09 · District of Columbia · Legislation
A District of Columbia condominium association may hold its meetings by video or telephone, count remote attendees toward quorum, and accept votes cast up to seven days before the meeting — and its own declaration and bylaws cannot forbid any of it. The authority stopped being an emergency measure and became permanent statute when the Fairness and Stability in Housing Amendment Act of 2024 took effect on May 2, 2025.1
Five years of stacked emergency and temporary acts ended there. Boards that have been re-reading a fresh expiry date every few months can stop.
What the measure does
Title III of the Act adds a new subsection (f) to D.C. Code § 42-1903.03, the meetings section of the DC Condominium Act of 1976. The subsection opens with an override, and the override is the point: “Notwithstanding any language contained in this chapter or in the condominium instruments”.2
Four things follow from it.
Electronic attendance, and quorum. Meetings of the association, the executive board or a committee “may be conducted or attended by telephone conference, video conference, or similar electronic means,” provided the system lets any unit owner in attendance “hear and be heard by, and to comprehend what is said by, all other unit owners participating in the meeting.” Anyone attending that way “shall be deemed present for quorum purposes.”
Access instructions ride with the notice. A link or instructions for joining an electronic meeting must be included in the notice the section already required.
Ballots with the notice. The board may set matters for a vote, deliver a ballot with the meeting notice, and “set a reasonable deadline for a ballot to be returned.”
Early electronic votes count as present. The board may authorize owners to submit votes by electronic transmission up to seven days before the scheduled meeting date, and those owners “shall be deemed to be present and voting in person at such meeting.” The old § 42-1903.03(b)(4) was struck and now reads “Repealed.”
Cooperatives got the same treatment, by deletion
The same Act reached DC's cooperative housing statutes by removing the conditions that had made remote meetings optional. In § 29-910, governing general cooperative associations, “If authorized by the articles or bylaws” became “Regardless of whether remote regular and special meetings of members are authorized by the articles or bylaws.” In §§ 29-1005.06(c), 29-1005.07(e) and 29-1008.11(b), covering limited cooperative associations, the phrase “Unless the organic rules otherwise provide” was simply deleted.3
The drafting choice is consistent across both regimes: the governing documents no longer get a veto.
What it changes for boards and managers
The practical shift is from permission to entitlement. Before, a DC association meeting remotely was relying on a temporary act with a countdown on it, and an owner who wanted to make trouble could argue the bylaws said otherwise. Neither argument survives § 42-1903.03(f).
Stop amending the documents for this. Associations that were mid-way through a declaration amendment to authorize electronic meetings are amending toward something the statute already supplies. The amendment is not harmful, but it is no longer the thing standing between the board and a lawful Zoom annual meeting.
The meeting-notice template needs a field. The join link or dial-in instructions are now part of the statutory notice content, not a courtesy. A notice that omits them is a defective notice, and election challenges in common-interest housing are usually notice challenges wearing a different hat.
The seven-day window changes proxy practice. An owner who transmits a vote electronically inside that window is treated as present and voting in person. That is a different animal from a proxy: there is no holder, nothing to revoke by later attendance, and no proxy-form validity question to litigate. Associations that have historically chased proxies to make quorum have a cleaner instrument available, and should decide deliberately which one they are using for which matter rather than running both and sorting out the collision afterward.
“Reasonable deadline” is the board's to set, and to defend. The statute does not define it. A deadline recorded in a board resolution before ballots go out is a materially different record from one announced after the count starts.
Record what the platform did. The audibility standard is written in functional terms — every participant able to hear, be heard, and comprehend. Minutes that record the platform used, that audio was two-way, and that no participant reported being unable to hear are the cheapest available evidence that the standard was met.
Where the ambiguity sits
Two questions are open on the face of the text.
The first is whether a board must offer an electronic option at all. The subsection is permissive — meetings “may be” conducted electronically. It confers no owner right to demand remote access to an in-person meeting, and nothing in the section obliges a board to provide one.
The second is how far the override reaches into procedure the instruments do control. “Notwithstanding any language contained in this chapter or in the condominium instruments” disposes of a bylaw that bans electronic meetings. It is a longer step to say it displaces a bylaw setting a higher quorum, a secret-ballot requirement, or an inspector-of-election procedure that an electronic platform cannot reproduce. Those provisions do not forbid electronic meetings; they impose conditions that electronic meetings may not satisfy.
What to watch next
No DC appellate decision has construed § 42-1903.03(f). Until one does, the safe reading of the override is the narrow one: it clears away prohibitions on the medium, not every procedural condition an association has adopted for how votes are taken.
Worth noting what did not change alongside it. The same Act made permanent the DC Housing Finance Agency's Reverse Mortgage Foreclosure Prevention Program and, for the first time, made condominium and homeowner association fees an eligible use of that assistance — a separate development covered in our report on the reverse-mortgage changes.
Related District of Columbia HOA Topics
- D.C. Law 25-324, the Fairness and Stability in Housing Amendment Act of 2024 (Bill 25-418; D.C. Act 25-694; 72 DCR 754; effective May 2, 2025) ↩
- D.C. Code § 42-1903.03, Meetings (codified text, including subsection (f) and the repeal of (b)(4)) ↩
- D.C. Code § 29-910, Cooperative associations — meetings of members (as amended) ↩
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