California HOA Election Rights After Arroyo v. Pacific Ridge

An HOA election is rarely a fair fight when the board controls the megaphone. The board decides what goes in the mailing, who gets to speak through the association's channels, and how much it can punish a member who challenges the result. A recently published California Court of Appeal decision, Arroyo v. Pacific Ridge Neighborhood Homeowners Assn., takes two of those levers away from the board. It clarifies what counts as "association media," and it confirms that the attorney fee math in an election dispute does not work the way most associations assume. Paired with two reform bills now moving through Sacramento, the decision marks a real shift in how much leverage a California homeowner has when an election goes sideways.

What Happened in Arroyo v. Pacific Ridge

The dispute started with a recall. A sitting board member was being removed by her own board, and she wanted to defend herself the same way every other candidate could — by submitting a candidate statement that the association prints and mails out with the ballots. The association invited every member to submit a statement except the members already on the board, the very people facing the recall. She was effectively silenced in the one channel that reaches every voter at the association's expense.

The association's theory was clever. Its own election rules declared that the candidate statements it printed and distributed were not "association media," so the equal-access rules did not apply to them. At the trial level, that argument worked. On appeal, it did not. The Court of Appeal held that material the association creates, pays to print, and mails to members alongside the ballots is association media — and once you give that access to any candidate, you owe it to every candidate. The decision is reported at Arroyo v. Pacific Ridge Neighborhood Homeowners Assn. (2025) 116 Cal.App.5th 627.

Why "Association Media" Is the Whole Ballgame

California's election rules sit in Cal. Civ. Code §5105, which requires associations to adopt election operating rules that give all candidates equal access to association media and equal opportunity to communicate with members. The fight in Arroyo was over the definition of that one phrase, because the definition decides who gets heard.

Remember the document hierarchy that governs every California HOA. Statutes sit at the top, then the recorded declaration and bylaws, and operating rules adopted by the board sit at the bottom. A board cannot use a low-level operating rule to redefine a term the Legislature used in a statute. That was the structural flaw in the association's position: it tried to shrink a statutory protection by relabeling its own mailing. The published opinion now makes clear that ballot materials containing candidate statements fall within association media, and the equal-access rule applies. Boards across the state can no longer carve favored candidates into the mailing and lock challengers out.

Published vs. Unpublished: Why the Designation Matters

When the Court of Appeal first ruled, the opinion was unpublished. An unpublished opinion resolves the case in front of it, but it generally cannot be cited as precedent in other matters. A published opinion can. Once published, any attorney in California can point a trial court to the decision as authority, and courts tend to follow it to stay consistent with one another.

That distinction is why getting Arroyo published was as important as winning it. A favorable but unpublished result helps one homeowner; a published result helps every homeowner whose board tries the same maneuver. LS Carlson Law submitted a publication request to the presiding justice explaining why the issue mattered beyond the parties, and the court ultimately ordered the opinion published. The same logic runs through any homeowner's decision about whether and how to appeal an adverse HOA ruling — the trial court is not the last word, and an appellate court may see an issue the trial judge did not.

The Attorney Fee Trap — and Why §5145 Changes It

Attorney fees are the quiet force that decides whether a homeowner can afford to be right. In most disputes over the governing documents, Cal. Civ. Code §5975 sets a prevailing-party rule: whoever wins recovers fees from whoever loses. That cuts both ways, and it is what makes litigation terrifying for an ordinary owner. The association has insurance and a budget; the homeowner has a mortgage. Facing a possible six-figure fee award if the case goes wrong is enough to make most people walk away from a legitimate claim.

Election disputes follow a different and far friendlier rule. Cal. Civ. Code §5145 governs challenges to election and voting violations, and it is asymmetric by design. A member who prevails may recover reasonable attorney fees and costs from the association, but the association generally cannot recover its fees from the member. That one-way structure exists because the Legislature understood the power imbalance and wanted homeowners to be able to enforce their election rights without betting the house. Arroyo reinforced that §5145 — not the two-way §5975 rule — controls in this setting.

The practical effect is a shift in leverage. When the downside of losing is capped and the upside of winning includes fees, an election claim stops being a financial death wish and becomes a real point of pressure. None of that removes risk — no case outcome is guaranteed, and the trial court in Arroyo got it wrong before the appellate court corrected it. But homeowners weighing a dispute should understand how the fee rules cut, which is why budgeting realistically for HOA legal expenses is part of the calculus from day one.

How This Fits With California's Election Rules

The Arroyo holding does not stand alone. It plugs into a detailed framework that already governs how California HOA elections are supposed to run — secret ballots, independent inspectors of elections, public ballot counting, and a one-year window to challenge election results in California under §5145. Local practice and the association's own adopted rules add another layer, and the way those election rules vary in practice can shape what a fair process actually looks like in your community. Arroyo simply removes one of the most common ways a board tries to tilt that framework: controlling who gets to speak in the official mailing.

Two Reform Bills Worth Watching

The same transparency pressure that produced Arroyo is moving through the Legislature. Two pending bills would push it further:

• AB 1184 — open meetings and serial decision-making. This bill targets the practice of boards making decisions outside of properly noticed meetings. It responds to case law that had read the rules to allow boards to deliberate privately, and it would bar serial meetings where a majority of the board reaches decisions through circulated emails or back-channel discussion. It would also give members a right to access meeting recordings the association makes and require disclosure when the association is involved in litigation, since it is the members' community and money on the line.
• SB 1007 — due process in disciplinary hearings. Introduced earlier this year and still pending, this bill would require an association to give a member the physical evidence it intends to use at least five business days before a disciplinary hearing, including digital metadata. The point is to end the ambush hearing, where a homeowner walks in and is confronted with evidence they have had no chance to review, dispute, or rebut.

Both bills share a theme that runs through Arroyo: bad boards rely on darkness, and sunlight is the cheapest remedy. A board with nothing to hide loses little when meetings are open and evidence is disclosed in advance. The agenda-packet problem captures it — members sit through a meeting watching the board vote on items they cannot see, like watching a movie blindfolded.

Where the Line Sits Between Self-Help and Counsel

An HOA is, in practical terms, a quasi-government with the power to fine you, lien your home, and control your community — but without the constitutional due-process guardrails that bind an actual government. Decisions like Arroyo and bills like AB 1184 and SB 1007 are slowly importing those guardrails. In the meantime, the framework already on the books gives homeowners more tools than most realize.

Much of the early work is self-help. Read your association's open-meeting obligations and election operating rules, request the records you are entitled to, and document every step in writing. If you are excluded from a candidate statement, denied equal access to the association's mailing, or recalled through a process that does not follow the rules, that is precisely the territory Arroyo addresses. When a board has retained counsel, when an election challenge approaches its one-year deadline, or when the violation is clear and ongoing, an experienced HOA attorney in California can assess whether the facts support a §5145 claim. The published decision did not just help one homeowner — it gave every California owner a citation to point to the next time a board tries to control the election by controlling the microphone.