Be prepared: The fat voting pen crisis is real and it is here

“Such a big pen in a cost of living crisis. The pen’s better fed than us.”

Alice Soper hoped voting would be cathartic. The rugby writer and commentator is running Green MP Tamatha Paul’s electorate campaign in Wellington North. She wanted to go into the polling booth and issue a “defiant strike” against what she calls “the bullshit we’ve suffered this last three years”. But when she got to the Wainuiomata War Memorial Hall in her home electorate of Hutt South, signs of trouble were literally smeared all around. Preceding voters had left streaks of orange marker all over the booth’s cardboard surfaces. Soper would quickly realise why. The nib of the supplied pen was comically oversized. Instead of a defiant strike, Soper issued the defeated smudge of an illiterate child. “One of the most adult actions I could take, reduced to the clumsy hand of a three-year-old waiting for their kids' meal,” she laments.

Soper is one among many. People all across the country have been reporting struggles with the Electoral Commission’s fat orange voting pens. When The Spinoff put out a call for people to share their run-ins with the thick nibs, the complaints were striking in their similarity. “I don’t think the pens used to be like toddler felts!?” said communications consultant Kerryanne Nelson. She went into the booth excited and came out feeling like a “dumb dumb that couldn’t vote properly”. 

RNZ Pacific’s news editor Justin Latif also reported feeling like he was in a “chaotic kindy colouring competition”. Former Spinoffer turned The Big Idea editor Gabi Lardies wanted the “Electoral Commission to know I’m not a baby”. Entrepreneur and social media personality Matilda Green had multiple concerns over the girthy democracy nibs. “First of all, there could be overlap due to the thickness, second of all, they took a couple of seconds to dry,” she said. “If someone folds the page too quickly, what if there was residue on another tick area???”

The complaints kept coming. Marketer Reuben Posthuma was tempted to get a new voting paper after his tick bled into the cell below. “But I was holding my two-year-old and my laziness beat my civic-mindedness,” he said. Senior creative producer Sarah Finnegan-Walsh said her “hands got stained with the girthy pen”. Jeweller Frances Stahl said she “didn’t do a tick so much as a splodge. Which was deeply unsettling”. Perhaps the best summation of the issue comes from the TikToker @Annarchy_NZ. “I don’t know why they got a pen from up the beanstalk,” she said, in a video I can’t recommend highly enough if for nothing other than its deranged filter choice. “Such a big pen in a cost of living crisis. The pen’s better fed than us.”

Though some correspondents thought these issues could be the result of a decline in our collective fine motor skills in the screen age, the problems weren’t limited to the incompetents who can no longer wield a pen. Josh Drummond, an actual artist who regularly uses a paintbrush, said he accidentally replaced his “emphatic party vote with a sad amorphous blob”.

The fat pen issues also appear to span the country, with the only dissenting opinions arriving from Rotorua and Te Atatu in west Auckland. “My seven-year-old did the ticks for me and he had absolutely no problem forming clear ticks in the circles,” said Ryan Gray, a senior consultant in Rotorua. “Fat felt was easy,” went the review from TV and documentary maker Dylan Reeve. 

Count the Electoral Commission among the pen defenders as well. Its deputy chief executive of operations Anusha Guler told The Spinoff the commission used orange pens because the colour shows up clearly and makes it easier for staff to count votes. It has distributed 51,200 pens so far, she said. There are two types; one that’s the same as the ones used in the 2023 election and some new ones. “Both nibs get a little thicker with use – but that’s okay!” Guler insisted. She urged people not to worry if their tick didn’t fit inside the circle. “As long as your preference is clear and you've only ticked one candidate and one party your vote will be counted,” she said.

So, probably no democratic impact. But what about the emotional impact of feeling like a crayon-wielding toddler in your most solemn democratic moment? This required an in-person investigation. Armed with my portfolio of complaints, I trudged through the barren halls of Highbury mall to see the big orange pens for myself. Just as it had been for Soper, my voting booth was absolutely covered in an ominous array of smudges and marks. I took out my paper, popped the cap on my big orange marker, and somehow, despite the really quite massive number of warnings I’d been issued by everyone I knew, still managed to absolutely shank it. Just the base of my tick took up half the voting circle. The rest spread haphazardly across the paper, straying dangerously close to the candidate list opposite. The fat pens had struck again.

Following my vote, I was somehow able to source one of the orange markers for myself. At home, I carried out further investigation, testing the orange nibs against a normal pen, a sharpie and a proper black vivid. Suffice to say, the democratic nibs are genuinely fat. They produced ticks at least twice the girth of the ones created using the vivid. The difference was most visible when the ticks were drawn inside a circle. In a medium circle, the orange smears could barely be contained. In a smaller one similar to those on the voting papers, another smudge emerged.

Thanks to this rigorous scientific testing, The Spinoff can confirm the voting pens are fat, big, almost impossibly, as they say, thicc. But what are we to do with this information? The answer, probably, is nothing. The pens have been sent out. Voting is underway. If you don’t bring your own writing implement, you’re probably going to smudge your voting circle like a pre-schooler.

But perhaps we can reframe things. There was, after all, another strain of feedback to The Spinoff; one that saw the big orange smears as powerful, emphatic and perhaps even alluring. “Thick is preferred,” said high-ranking Auckland councillor Richard Hills. “Not thick enough. I like my pens THIIIIIIIIIICK,” said nurse practitioner Mikey Brenndorfer. “While any tick is a good tick, sometimes you just want a big pen to really make your mark on the ballot paper, you know what I'm saying!” said PR consultant Conor Whitten. 

It’s at least worth trying to follow their lead. Maybe we’re not messing up our ballots by placing a huge smudge where a clipped tick should be. Maybe we’re just creating more democracy to love.