California Civil Code §§ 5260 & 5220
Requests that must be in writing
Seven kinds of member request take effect only if the member delivers them to the association in writing. One of them is the choice to opt into or out of voting by electronic secret ballot — which means a member's voting method cannot be changed by a phone call, a conversation at a meeting, or a note in the manager's file.
Civil Code § 5260 — the text
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/5260.json — the same text with its subdivision anchors, dates and sources.
Civil Code § 5220 — the text
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/5220.json — the same text with its subdivision anchors, dates and sources.
What this section actually does
It is a formality rule, and a useful one. Rather than specifying the writing requirement separately in seven places across the Act, the Legislature collected them here: membership list corrections, second addresses, individual delivery of general notices, opting out of the membership list, requests for full reports, and — added by AB 2159 — the electronic voting opt-out under § 5105.
The common thread is that each one changes how the association must treat that member going forward. Requiring the request in writing means the association can prove what it was asked to do, and the member can prove they asked.
The operational consequence for elections
A member who tells the manager they would rather have a paper ballot has not opted out. Until the request arrives in writing, the association's records still say electronic — and acting on the conversation instead of the record is how an association ends up having sent the wrong thing to someone who can later show they asked for something else.
The inverse is just as awkward: honouring a verbal request means the association deviated from its own records with nothing to point to. Either way, the fix is the same — route the request into writing, and keep it.
Written, and delivered under § 4035
The section requires delivery pursuant to Section 4035, which sets out how a member delivers a document to the association. "In writing" is therefore not satisfied by any record the association happens to create about the member; it is a document the member sends, by a route the statute recognises.
Electronic writing is still writing — ESIGN and California's UETA settle that — so a form on the association's site can satisfy this, provided what it produces is a request from the member rather than a setting an administrator toggled. The same distinction as proxies.
What the register has to hold
- The request as it was made, retained — not a flag derived from it.
- When it arrived, which decides whether it beat the 90-day cut-off in § 5105 for changing voting method.
- Which of the seven it was. A request about the membership list is not a request about ballots, and systems that collapse them lose the ability to say which the member exercised.
- The address it names, where it adds or removes one.
- What the opt-out under (d) actually switches off. Section 5220 is the other half of it: a member may opt out of the sharing of their name, property address, email address and mailing address, and that opt-out stands until the member changes it. It is a standing instruction about the membership list, not about ballots — collapsing the two loses which one the member exercised.
- Whether a later request superseded it. These are standing instructions, so the current state is the sum of the history, not the last write.
Members without email are not an exception to handle
They are a channel. A member who has not opted into electronic voting receives paper, and in most associations that group is neither small nor randomly distributed — it skews toward the owners whose records are least current, which is the same group whose ballots most often go astray. Planning for them is hybrid election planning, not exception handling.
Related
- § 5105 — election rules, and the 90-day window for changing voting method.
- § 5115 — notice, and what has to reach each member.
- Hybrid elections — why these requests shape the two channels.
- Deadline calculator — the dates these requests have to beat.