Proxy Voting Setup Guide

Proxy voting lets a member who cannot attend an AGM or board meeting appoint another member to cast their vote for them. It is digital delegation with an audit trail, not a paper proxy form that gets collected, transcribed, and eventually mislaid.

It is turned on per session with the proxyEnabled setting and is available on Meeting sessions only. Scheduled Election sessions do not offer it, because there is no live meeting for a proxy to attend on someone's behalf. This is different from split vote allocation, which works on both session types.

This surprises most admins the first time, so it is worth leading with: the holder starts it, not the delegator. The member who will hold the proxy generates a proxy code from their own voter portal and shares it with the person who wants to delegate to them. The delegator then enters that code in their own portal to appoint them.

The holder initiates, the delegator confirms. Neither side can appoint on the other's behalf without both steps happening.

Appointments are open only while both of these are true: the session is still in DRAFT, and the cutoff (if one is set) has not passed.

Word the deadline for members the same way VoteAlly's own emails do: "before voting opens, no later than {cutoff}". That phrasing states both conditions instead of implying the cutoff is the only one that matters.

The proxy window is a different mechanism from early voting. Early voting opens the ballot ahead of the meeting so members can cast their own vote in advance. The proxy window opens delegation ahead of the meeting so absent members can hand their vote to someone attending. If you use both, opening early voting ends the proxy window, because the session leaves DRAFT at that moment.

Each delegator may have one active delegation at a time. VoteAlly refuses a proxy chain: you cannot delegate to someone who has themselves delegated their vote away, and a member who currently holds a proxy cannot turn around and delegate their own vote to someone else.

In practice this means the person a member appoints must be someone who plans to attend and vote directly, not another absent member.

This is a real support question, so it is worth stating plainly: who can undo an appointment depends entirely on whether the proxy window has frozen.

A proxy holder's effective weight is their own weight plus the weight of everyone who appointed them. They cast a ballot once, carrying the combined weight. Every member they represent is recorded as having participated, so turnout figures count people represented, not just people who clicked a link.

On a proxy session, the results export includes a Proxy Attribution block that reports weight and voters represented directly versus by proxy, always using the word "represented" rather than "voted", because it reflects each voter's current weight rather than the weight frozen onto their ballot at cast time. Details on reading that export are in the reports and exports guide.

Once a member has appointed a proxy holder, they cannot cast their own ballot as well. VoteAlly refuses the attempt. Their holder votes on their behalf, and that single cast carries the combined weight described above.

Voters who have delegated their vote are excluded from invitation and reminder emails, since their holder votes for them and there is nothing left for them to do. They always receive the formal meeting notice, though. That is deliberate: notice is owed to the whole roster, delegated or not.

Members can sign in during the DRAFT proxy window with either their emailed magic link or their access code, so a long gap between sending notice and holding the meeting is safe. Nobody is locked out of appointing a proxy just because their original link has aged. For a full walkthrough of what members see, share the voter help guide.

Harbourview Condominium Corporation, 140 units, is holding its AGM on November 12, 2026. The bylaws cap any one owner's proxy holdings at three units besides their own, so the board sets maxProxiesPerHolder to 3. The board also sets proxyCutoff to November 5, 2026, and tells owners "appoint your proxy before voting opens, no later than November 5."

Notice goes out on October 15. Owners who cannot attend ask a neighbour who is attending to generate a proxy code, and exchange codes over the following weeks. The board opens early voting on November 8, three days after the cutoff. Because the cutoff falls first, November 5 is the date that actually closes appointments, and the quoted deadline holds. Had the board instead launched on November 3, appointments would have closed that day and the November 5 date quoted to owners would never have taken effect.

After the meeting, the board exports the proxy register to confirm no single owner ended up representing more than three others, and keeps it with the minutes.

Digital proxy delegation does not prevent proxy harvesting. A holder cap, an appointment deadline, self-revocation, and a full audit register make concentration visible and bounded, but none of them stop an organizer from soliciting appointments in the first place. If a board is worried about one person collecting a large block of proxies, the cap and the register are tools for spotting and limiting that, not a guarantee it will not be attempted.

VoteAlly also does not determine whether your proxy setup satisfies a bylaw requirement. It records what the bylaws typically ask about, an appointment window, a cap, a deadline, and an auditable history. Whether that specific configuration meets your governing documents is a determination your board or association counsel needs to make.

The proxy register export (CSV) lists every appointment made on the session along with its status, including appointments that were later revoked or voided. It is a history, not just a snapshot of what is active right now, so it can answer "who appointed whom, and when did that change" after the meeting is over.

Download it, along with the check-in report and results export, from the reports and exports guide, which also covers the check-in record produced by attendance check-in.

Proxy delegation is a session-level feature; see VoteAlly's pricing page for current plan details.