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California Civil Code §§ 5125 & 5200

Retention and inspection

Once the ballots are counted, they do not become scrap. Ballots, signed envelopes, voter lists, candidate registration lists and proxies become association election materials — retained in the association's custody and open to inspection by members.

Sections Civ. Code § 5125 · § 5200 Amendment § 5125: AB 2159 (2024) · § 5200: SB 410 (2025) Related § 5145 · § 5120 In force § 5125 in force 2025-01-01 · § 5200 in force 2026-01-01 Text verified 2026-10-10

Civil Code § 5125 — the text

Custody of Ballots and Election Materials
Amended by Stats. 2024, Ch. 383, Sec. 5. (AB 2159) Effective January 1, 2025.

The sealed ballots, signed voter envelopes, voter list, proxies, candidate registration list, and tally sheet of votes cast by electronic secret ballot shall at all times be in the custody of the inspector or inspectors of elections or at a location designated by the inspector or inspectors until after the tabulation of the vote, and until the time allowed by Section 5145 for challenging the election has expired, at which time custody shall be transferred to the association. If there is a recount or other challenge to the election process, the inspector or inspectors of elections shall, upon written request, make the ballots and the tally sheet of votes cast by electronic secret ballot available for inspection and review by an association member or the member’s authorized representative. Any recount shall be conducted in a manner that preserves the confidentiality of the vote.

Reproduced verbatim from the California Legislative Counsel's published text and verified word-for-word against a second source (leginfo (Legislative Counsel official bulk code database, LAW_SECTION_TBL) · California Public Law (Public.Law)). California statutes are government edicts and carry no copyright. This is an unofficial reproduction — the official version is published by the Legislative Counsel at leginfo.legislature.ca.gov, and that version governs.
Machine-readable: /data/5125.json — the same text with its subdivision anchors, dates and sources.

Civil Code § 5200 — the text

Definitions for Record Inspection Article
Amended by Stats. 2025, Ch. 516, Sec. 3. (SB 410) Effective January 1, 2026.

For the purposes of this article, the following definitions shall apply:
(a)“Association records” means all of the following:
(a)(1)Any financial document required to be provided to a member in Article 7 (commencing with Section 5300) or in Sections 5565 and 5810.
(a)(2)Any financial document or statement required to be provided in Article 2 (commencing with Section 4525) of Chapter 4.
(a)(3)Interim financial statements, periodic or as compiled, containing any of the following:
(a)(3)(A)Balance sheet.
(a)(3)(B)Income and expense statement.
(a)(3)(C)Budget comparison.
(a)(3)(D)General ledger. A “general ledger” is a report that shows all transactions that occurred in an association account over a specified period of time.
(a)(3) [concluding text]The records described in this paragraph shall be prepared in accordance with an accrual or modified accrual basis of accounting.
(a)(4)Executed contracts not otherwise privileged under law.
(a)(5)Written board approval of vendor or contractor proposals or invoices.
(a)(6)State and federal tax returns.
(a)(7)Reserve account balances and records of payments made from reserve accounts.
(a)(8)Agendas and minutes of meetings of the members, the board, and any committees appointed by the board pursuant to Section 7212 of the Corporations Code; excluding, however, minutes and other information from executive sessions of the board as described in Article 2 (commencing with Section 4900).
(a)(9)Membership lists, including name, property address, mailing address, email address, as collected by the association in accordance with Section 4041 where applicable, but not including information for members who have opted out pursuant to Section 5220.
(a)(10)Check registers.
(a)(11)The governing documents.
(a)(12)An accounting prepared pursuant to subdivision (b) of Section 5520.
(a)(13)An “enhanced association record” as defined in subdivision (b).
(a)(14)“Association election materials” as defined in subdivision (c).
(a)(15)All inspector’s reports compiled pursuant to Section 5551.
(b)“Enhanced association records” means invoices, receipts, and canceled checks for payments made by the association, purchase orders approved by the association, bank account statements for bank accounts in which assessments are deposited or withdrawn, credit card statements for credit cards issued in the name of the association, statements for services rendered, and reimbursement requests submitted to the association.
(c)“Association election materials” means returned ballots, signed voter envelopes, the voter list of names, parcel numbers, and voters to whom ballots were to be sent, proxies, the candidate registration list, and the tally sheet of votes cast by electronic secret ballot. Signed voter envelopes may be inspected but may not be copied. An association shall maintain association election materials for one year after the date of the election.

Sources differ. Second-source discrepancy in (a)(1): the official Legislative Counsel database reads "in Sections 5565 and 5810" (plural), while california.public.law renders "in Section 5565 and 5810". The official reading is adopted as authoritative; the public.law form appears to be an artifact of that site's automatic citation linking, and the plural is grammatically required by the two cited sections. No other word-level differences between the two sources. Text taken verbatim from the Legislative Counsel of California official code database (LAW_SECTION_TBL in pubinfo_2025.zip, the same data that backs leginfo.legislature.ca.gov) and independently compared word-by-word against california.public.law. The only differences were whitespace artifacts around hyperlinked section citations on public.law (e.g. "Section 5105 ."), not textual differences. The "heading" field is an editorial descriptive label written for this dataset; California Civil Code sections carry no official heading in the statutory text itself.

Reproduced verbatim from the California Legislative Counsel's published text and verified word-for-word against a second source (leginfo (Legislative Counsel official bulk code database, LAW_SECTION_TBL) · California Public Law (Public.Law)). California statutes are government edicts and carry no copyright. This is an unofficial reproduction — the official version is published by the Legislative Counsel at leginfo.legislature.ca.gov, and that version governs.
Machine-readable: /data/5200.json — the same text with its subdivision anchors, dates and sources.

What becomes a record

The category is wider than people expect, and it is the width that matters: the materials have to be enough, taken together, to let someone reconstruct whether the election was conducted properly without having been there.

Three things that are not enumerated but on which every defence depends: evidence that notice was given, per member; the consent register showing who was entitled to vote electronically and who had switched; and the version of the election rules that applied, retained as a version rather than as whatever the rules happen to say now.

Retention runs with the challenge window

A member may bring an action over a flawed secret-ballot election for a year after the result is announced. Retention that expires before that window closes is retention that fails at exactly the moment it is needed — which is why the practical retention period is driven by § 5145 rather than by storage convenience.

Inspection does not reopen the secret ballot

A member's right to inspect election materials is a right to verify the procedure, not to learn how their neighbours voted. The record has to permit the first without enabling the second — which is a property a system either has by construction or cannot acquire afterwards. See § 5120 on why the separation has to be structural.

Custody

The materials are the association's, not the inspector's and not the vendor's. An inspector who holds them after the engagement, or a platform that keeps them on terms that make retrieval depend on an active subscription, has created a problem the association will discover at the worst possible moment.

Two questions worth asking any provider before an election rather than after: where do the materials live when the engagement ends, and what does the association receive if the relationship stops. The answer should be a complete, portable set of records that reads without the vendor's software.

The conflict nobody plans for

Retention is a duty to keep. Privacy law gives individuals a right to have their data erased. For an association operating only in California the tension is manageable; for a manager or platform operating across jurisdictions — California alongside Europe, say — it is a design question that has to be answered before the first election rather than at the first request.

It is not resolved by choosing one law over the other. It is resolved by a documented retention schedule that states what is kept, on what legal basis, for how long, and what happens at the end — and by building so that personal data can be severed from the evidentiary record without destroying the record's integrity.

A record that cannot be replayed is not much of a record

Keeping the ballots proves what was submitted. It does not prove how the result was derived. The association also needs the roll as it stood at the record date, the rules as they stood, and a tally that can be reproduced from those inputs — otherwise answering the question § 5145 actually asks, whether a defect changed the outcome, means arguing from recollection against a statutory presumption.

Practical shape

  1. Close the election into a fixed set. At certification, the materials stop being working files and become a record: enumerated, sealed, and listed in the inspector's report.
  2. Keep the inputs, not only the output. Roll at the record date, rules version, consent register, notice delivery evidence, proxies, ballots.
  3. Make it readable without you. Open formats, a manifest, and no dependency on a live system to interpret it.
  4. Schedule the ending. A retention period stated in advance, tied to the challenge window, with a documented disposal step — not an archive that grows until someone deletes it in a panic.

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