Electronic Voting for ОСИ Owners in Kazakhstan: How It Actually Works

An ОСИ chairman deciding whether to run a vote online usually starts from the wrong worry. The question is not whether owners can be trusted with a phone app; it is what the law actually requires from the vote itself. Under Kazakhstan's Law on Housing Relations, the answer is more permissive than most boards assume, and more specific than most software claims.

The law expressly allows voting through a digital object

Art. 44 of the Law on Housing Relations creates the "цифровой объект в сфере жилищных отношений и жилищно-коммунального хозяйства" - the statutory name for a housing app or portal - as a valid way to run an absentee vote. A vote through the digital object must stay open at least seven days and no more than two months from the day the meeting is announced. Results collected this way count toward the totals of both in-person and absentee (заочный) meetings, not as a separate track.

Choosing which digital service the building uses is not left to the chairman alone: it is its own item on the assembly's agenda (art. 42, para. 5, sub-para. 18), and it passes on a majority of the owners who actually vote, once quorum - more than half of all owners - is met (art. 42, para. 8). That threshold is lighter than the "majority of all owners" rule that applies to several other agenda items, which is worth knowing before a board assumes a digital-service decision needs unanimous buy-in.

Residents do not need an ЭЦП to vote

This is the point most boards get wrong, in both directions. Order № 163 (the ministerial order on decision-making rules for a condominium object), para. 22, requires that the owner be identified when voting through a digital object - it does not require the resident to hold a Kazakhstani national digital signature (ЭЦП). The regulation leaves the identification method open rather than prescribing one, which is a real gap: a platform has to design its own identification flow, because the law does not hand it one.

What the order does require an ЭЦП for is different: when the vote's protocol is drawn up electronically, it is signed with an ЭЦП by the chairman, the secretary of the assembly and the members of the house council (совет дома) - not by rank-and-file residents (Order № 163, para. 24). A resident casting a vote and a board member certifying the result are two different acts under two different rules, and conflating them is the single most common mistake in how this gets described.

One caveat worth stating plainly: the statute itself, at art. 42, para. 15, names the protocol's signers as the chairman, the secretary and the initiator of the meeting - a slightly different set than the ministerial order's chairman/secretary/house-council trio. The two documents have not been fully reconciled, so no vendor, this one included, should claim a single definitive signer list.

What the protocol is worth

Whether it is produced on paper or printed from an electronic record, a protocol from a properly run assembly is an official document: it can be used in court and before other state bodies as the owners' expression of will, and it is the basis for calculating housing assistance (art. 42, para. 13). Where the protocol is drawn up electronically, it must be stored under Kazakhstan's Electronic Document and Digital Signature Law (art. 44, para. 3). The list of who voted - full name, apartment number - is a required, numbered, bound part of the protocol (art. 42, para. 12), and any owner or the housing inspectorate can request a copy within five working days (art. 42, para. 17).

What this means for choosing a platform

For an ОСИ chairman, the practical checklist is short: does the platform run a vote for the right window (7 days to 2 months), does it identify the voter in some verifiable way, does it produce a numbered list of who voted, and does it hand the chairman, secretary and house council a way to sign the resulting protocol electronically when that is how the building wants to store it. None of that requires residents to obtain a national digital signature first - which is usually the objection that kills a digital-voting rollout before it starts, and it is based on a requirement that, for the voter, does not exist.

In practice, identification is easiest to build around however the resident is already confirmed inside the building's app: if they signed in with an apartment number and the phone number tied to their account at registration, that is enough to count the vote, and no separate procedure on top is needed. A separate question is transparency of the process itself for the board: a platform that shows in real time how many owners have already voted and whether quorum is met saves the chairman a round of calls to neighbors the night before the deadline, and produces the numbered list of voters automatically once voting closes, instead of by hand from scattered messages in the building's chat.

For a board, this is in practice two different use cases on the same platform: an absentee vote run entirely online from the moment the meeting is announced, and topping up the results of an in-person meeting already underway with the votes of owners who could not attend. It is worth a platform supporting both, because a board does not always know in advance which way quorum will actually be reached on a given agenda item.

Sources: Law of the Republic of Kazakhstan "On Housing Relations" (arts. 42, 44), and Order No. 163 of the Acting Minister of Industry and Infrastructure Development, 30 March 2020 (приказ и.о. Министра индустрии и инфраструктурного развития РК № 163 от 30.03.2020), current redaction, both via adilet.zan.kz, accessed 2026-09-07.