This article discusses how quorum requirements for electronic strata committee meetings in NSW work, explaining who can chair email-based meetings and why a motion can fail when too few eligible members actually submit votes, even if others are technically present.
Question: Is the strata manager required to chair an email committee meeting? At the same meeting, can a motion be declared defeated for lack of quorum when eligible members were “present” but did not vote?
We recently held an email-based strata committee meeting where everyone was required to email their vote to the strata manager.
For the first motion, the strata manager said that, for electronic voting, they had to be the chair even though a committee member filled the chair position. All six committee members voted in favour. Is the strata manager required to be elected as chair for an email or electronic committee meeting instead of the already elected committee chair?
For the third motion, we have eight committee members in total. One never participated, two were ineligible to vote due to a conflict of interest, so five members were eligible to vote on that motion. Of those five, three voted in favour, and two did not vote.
The strata manager declared the motion defeated, saying that a quorum of four votes was not met. In this situation, does the motion fail due to not reaching a quorum even though three of the five eligible members voted in favour and the other two were “present”, but did not vote?
Answer: The third motion did not meet the quorum requirement.
It appears you are describing a meeting conducted by pre-meeting electronic voting. In this scenario, the strata manager, who collects and counts the ballots, is effectively acting as the chairperson and should be elected as such. If a committee member chaired and conducted the meeting, that committee member could be elected as the chairperson.
Regarding the third motion: When voting occurs via pre-meeting electronic voting, any strata committee member who submits a vote is taken to be present for the purpose of establishing a quorum. This is in accordance with Schedule 2, Part 3, sections 12(3) and 12(4) of the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015, which provide that a person who votes by a permitted non-attendance method is taken to be present, and that quorum is calculated based on the number of committee members last determined by the owners corporation.
In this case, the strata committee consists of eight members. Only three members submitted votes, meaning that only three were considered present. As four members are required to form a quorum, the third motion did not meet the quorum requirement.
Jana Antelmann
Strata Life
E: jana@thestratalife.com.au
P: 02 9456 9917
This post appears in the March 2026 edition of The NSW Strata Magazine.
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Read next:
- NSW: Q&A Electronic Committee Meetings and Electronic Voting
- NSW: Q&A Proxy and Voting Rules for Owners Corporation Meetings
- NSW: Pre-Meeting Electronic Voting – When (and When Not) to Use it
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