Proxy farming or harvesting is where one owner, usually the chair, approaches a number of individuals and convinces them that their proxy vote is needed for the smooth running of the building. What they possibly don’t realise is that dozens of other owners are getting the same message and at the end of the day the Proxy Farmer has a stack of votes that they can use to block motions, promote their own preferences, elect their own choice of committee members, reduce the size of the committee to exclude opponents (aka ‘troublemakers’) and free themselves from financial restraints for the next year.
Another popular way of amassing votes is to use their position in the EC to launch a scare campaign claiming that without proxies, the AGM could be non-quorate which would be an economic disaster on a par with the Global Financial Crisis.
It’s a racing certainty that proxy farming will be banned in the current review of strata law in NSW, as it has in Queensland and S.A. where there are limits on the number of proxies individuals can hold plus, in the latter case, postal voting on specific issues.
It’s the strata equivalent of branch stacking and you can bet anyone who does it is probably up to no good.