Ballot Mailings | LetterStream Blog

Easily Send Ballot and Proxy Mailings with LetterStream

Every year, HOA associations and community organizations face the same challenge: how to efficiently manage ballot and proxy mailings while ensuring compliance, accuracy, and timely delivery. The stakes are high—board elections, annual meetings, and critical community decisions often rely on a process that must be transparent and trustworthy.

This is where a trusted print and mail service like LetterStream shines. With the ability to send mail online, associations can reduce stress, save time, and rest easy knowing their ballots and proxies are in good hands.

Why Accuracy in Ballot Mailings Matters

Imagine the frustration of an association manager who spends hours preparing ballots, only to have them delayed, lost, or returned because of an incorrect address. In elections, small mistakes can cause big headaches. Not only does this delay decision-making, but it can also impact compliance with governing documents or even state laws.

LetterStream provides a streamlined solution, making sure every envelope is printed, stuffed, and mailed with precision. Since 95% of mail goes out the next business day, organizations can trust that deadlines are met without scrambling at the last minute.

Proxy Mailings: More Than Just Paperwork

Proxy mailings may sound routine, but they carry weight. When members cannot attend a meeting, their proxy ensures their voice is still heard. Mishandling these documents can compromise the integrity of a vote and erode trust.

That’s why associations—from HOAs to professional organizations—turn to LetterStream. By using a secure print and mail service, managers gain visibility into the mailing process, including address verification, tracking, and reporting. That peace of mind is priceless during high-stakes decisions.

Compliance and Transparency in Elections

For associations, elections aren’t just about popularity contests—they’re about legal compliance. Governing documents often require proper notice and proof of delivery. Missing deadlines or failing to send ballots the right way can result in invalid elections or even legal disputes.

LetterStream helps associations protect themselves by offering services like:

Certified Mail online for proof of mailing and delivery.
Detailed reporting for tracking each piece of mail.
Archiving capabilities for accountability and transparency.

The Benefits of Sending Ballots and Proxies Online

Switching to an online print and mail partner makes the entire process smoother. Here’s how:

Speed and Convenience – Upload documents, select mail type, and let the system handle the rest.
Accuracy and Reliability – Automated processes reduce human error and ensure proper formatting.
Cost Savings – Eliminate manual labor, supplies, and trips to the post office.
Peace of Mind – Track mailings from start to finish, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.

For HOA managers, association boards, and administrators, this means less stress and more time to focus on member engagement and community priorities.

Real-World Example: HOA Board Elections

Consider an HOA managing 500 homes. Preparing ballot packets by hand could take staff days to print, stuff, and track. By outsourcing through LetterStream, the HOA simply uploads documents, sets parameters, and receives confirmation when ballots are in the mail stream. What once took days can be handled in minutes.

That’s not just efficiency—it’s a competitive advantage.

Ready for Your Next Ballot Mailing?

Ballots and proxies are too important to leave to chance. By trusting a proven print and mail service, organizations gain accuracy, compliance, and peace of mind. Whether you’re managing a neighborhood election or overseeing a professional association’s annual meeting, LetterStream ensures your voice—and your members’ voices—are heard.

LetterStream makes printing and mailing a breeze!

LetterStream offers bulk printing and mailing services allowing companies to send physical mail online. Whether it’s online Certified Mail, First-Class Mail, FedEx 2Day, or postcards, we give both small businesses and large corporations that time and freedom back to work on tasks that better serve the company. If you’re interested in creating a free account, you can do so, here.

Complaints of Missing Mail: Can you prove it mailed?

Where's my mail? — Hey! Where’s my mail?

We always hate to hear about letters not making it to their desired destination, after all, we are a communication company. And yes, we do get to blame some missing letters on the USPS, but sometimes the blame works its way back to us. And that’s fine, its a role that we play, but I’d like to share a response that we’ve been able to offer to our clients to help them out.

Before I jump right into the details, I think it important that you know that we have processed over 1 million mailing jobs for clients. And if each job had 1,000 recipients, then we’ve processed over 1 billion pieces of mail. I say this not to gloat, but to let you know that the information we provide is from the viewpoint of an expert of experts.

The question is often presented to us as; “My customer thinks we didn’t get the mailing out properly. Can you prove that it really went out?”

Here is the response we like to use.

So sorry to be the barer of bad news, but technically, no proof of mailing exists after-the-fact for First-Class Mail. We offer various forms of mailing proofs for purchase before a mailing is sent out. These include: certificate of mailing, certificate of bulk mailing, certified mail and affidavit of mailing. Since these items were not purchased in advance, there really is no “proof” that the mail happened.

However, we can offer an Affidavit of Prior Mailing, which is a legal document where we attest that we did everything correctly. Unfortunately the fees for this service are $50; mainly because we tear the building apart and attempt to recreate exactly what happened on the day in question. We really find out exactly what happened to every piece of mail.

All that said, I think you are really wanting to know if the mailing went out on time, to all the recipients listed in the address file. The easy answer to this is; certainly. We track every completed piece of mail with a high speed camera. The camera looks at the unique mail piece ID and compares it to the database of pieces that need to be mailed. If these items don’t match up exactly we jump in and find out what went wrong. Ultimately all jobs “reconcile”. Are we 100% positive that every single piece made it to the postal service? No, but we are 99.9999% positive that your mailing went out exactly as specified.

“But why are the board members saying the mailing didn’t go out?” We hear this concern fairly often, but each time we research it, we find that we’ve done everything correctly. And ultimately the board members all receive their mail. The concerns are often brought up by homeowners and often in response to an HOA Board member asking them as they communicate casually in the neighborhood.

There are a few things that can be done when board members express concern about missing mail. First, ask if they received their letter, and if not, ask if they would check their mail carefully. Second, ask the Board member who reported someone else’s lost mail to check back in with the homeowner and see if they received it.

A slightly different way to approach this topic is to review the use of the LetterStream tools that we make available to help mail get noticed. As I reviewed the outer envelope of the mailing in question, I noticed that you could have taken advantage of our free Endorsement printing. We allow our customers to put big bold text on the outer envelope to draw attention to the envelope. We offer this to prevent concerns exactly like this. By offering and encouraging the free use of an Endorsement, the amount of lost mail complaints has gone down. You can add things like “Important Neighborhood News” or “Urgent Community Meeting” or similar wording.

Another thing we encourage communities to do is make sure and use the community name in the return address area of the envelope. While community management companies would like to think that every homeowner knows who they are, this simply isn’t true. And if someone can’t identify the personal relevancy of a piece of mail to them, they generally cannot recall getting it. If you add the community name to the return address and add the endorsement printing I think you’ll find far fewer concerns about lost mail.

Hopefully this has provided a little extra insight into how people both mentally and physically process their mail. In addition, maybe its given you some tools to ponder the next time you create a mailing in order to achieve maximum impact.

For more information, you might want to review this help article.

Best Practice – Secret Ballot Envelope

Letterstream Secret Ballot Envelope

Ballot Mailing Best Practices

Improve voter turnout with our new and improved ballot envelope! We have researched and improved our Secret Ballot Envelope in such a way to create a Best Practice solution for secret ballots and your next election. We’ve had a secret ballot envelope for quite some time and have worked with our customers to create a new version that accomplishes nearly every requirement of a secret ballot mailing.

A Secret Ballot Envelope is important to protect the identity of the voter. It is used in conjunction with a ballot and a #9 return envelope. The completed ballot is placed in a Secret Ballot Envelope (which is large enough to hold a folded 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper, but small enough to fit in a standard size return envelope) and sealed. Then the Secret Ballot Envelope gets placed in the #9 return envelope and gets mailed back to the management company. The management company can then open all the #9 envelopes and take the sealed ballot envelopes to the meeting for counting.

For those who need to keep track of which homeowners have returned their ballot or proxy, we have a simple option to add the homeowners mailing address and/or lot number to the return address area of the #9 envelope. This allows the HOA management companies to see who has voted, while not being able to see how they voted for the election.

There might be a few individuals who say “Ah, nobody cares how other people vote.”. Well, we might argue that anyone who says something like that has probably not served of a Homeowner Board or talked with their neighbors who don’t vote out of fear that their vote might be held against them. We might also argue that the number of homeowners voting could improve when a secure and trustworthy process is followed.

New Features of our Ballot Envelope:

– Instructions for Homeowner – The envelope more clearly explains to the homeowner/recipient/voter what their role is and how to best use the envelope in order to keep their ballot secret.

– Instructions for Management Company – The envelope contains instructions for the management company, board member or whoever handles the secret ballot so they can process it while protecting the intentions of a secret ballot.

– Save a Page – With good instructions built right into the envelope, you no longer need to try and wordsmith some good directions in your own document. This might just free up some space in your letter or possibly save an entire sheet of paper.

– Professionally Designed – This new envelope looks far more professional in its design which may lead to better utilization and compliance.

– Best Practices – We’ve attempted to incorporate the appropriate instructions and simplistic design in an effort to create a “Best Practices” solution to proxy and Secret Ballot mailings.

– Same Security Tint – Our Secret Ballot Envelope continues to have security tint on the inside of the envelope to keep prying eyes from trying to see through the envelope.

– Same Great Price – While we believe this envelope is far superior to our earlier version we’ve decided to leave the price the same as its always been.

We believe this is the best way to solicit proxies and votes from your members; its secure, its fast and its easy. Give it a try for your next election or proxy mailing and let us know how it worked for you.