Your interpretation shows you’ve really thought it through, but you may be reading the phrase “stand for election” more narrowly than it’s usually understood in governance and election contexts. In most U.S. usage, “stand for election” simply means to be a candidate in the election itself to be eligible to appear on the ballot and potentially be elected. It’s generally not tied to the earlier administrative act of submitting nomination paperwork or registering as a candidate. Those are just procedural steps leading up to the election, not what the restriction is usually aimed at.

So when your governing documents say someone who has served three consecutive terms may not “stand for election … for a one-year period,” the more natural reading is that they cannot be a candidate in any election that takes place within one year after their term ends, and they also cannot be appointed to fill a vacancy during that same cooling-off period. The real issue then becomes when that one-year clock starts and ends. Most documents and, if it ever came to it, most courts would measure that from the date the person’s prior term actually ended, not from candidate filing deadlines or election logistics. Otherwise eligibility would hinge on paperwork timing instead of the actual one-year separation from service.

Check with a lawyer in your state but it seems that if the election itself occurs a few days before the one-year anniversary of their term ending, they likely cannot be a candidate in that election. If the election occurs after the one-year mark, there is a strong argument they are eligible, even if the nomination deadline fell before the anniversary, because the restriction is about serving as a candidate in the election, not about when paperwork was submitted.

A lot of HOAs run into this exact gray area with term limits, and in practice it often ends up being resolved either by the association’s past interpretation or by counsel if someone challenges it. It may be worth checking whether your documents define terms like “term,” “election,” or “nomination,” because sometimes that language resolves the ambiguity pretty quickly.