Overseas voters filling in their ballots electronically say Adobe’s software won’t let them tick some parties with a click, prompting the Electoral Commission to urge voters to check their papers before uploading.
A social media user raised the problem this week, posting a screenshot of their overseas voting paper opened in Adobe Reader.
Adobe’s “Fill & Sign” tool had detected some of the voting circles as editable fields, shown in blue, which the user could tick with a single click. Others, shown in white, could not be ticked the same way.
They said they could get around it by stamping a tick on manually or printing the paper out, and acknowledged the fault was likely unintentional.
“However, given that this is an official voting document, shouldn’t it be equally straightforward to mark a vote for every party?” they wrote.
Other overseas voters reported different results on their own papers. One said every party had a blue circle except Women’s Rights. Another said National’s option appeared white while Labour’s was blue. A third said the Green Party’s field sat off to the right of its circle, so a tick placed there could not be seen.
“I struggled with the electronic completion of the form/ballot so much that in the end I just printed it and finished it manually,” that voter wrote.
An Electoral Commission spokesperson said the commission designed the ballot paper so most PDF readers could open it.
“Downloaded voting papers are provided as a standard PDF, rather than a fillable form.”
“While electronic devices can be used to complete voting papers, voters should consider how applications may display, position or save their markings,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said Adobe users blocked by the automatic fields could bypass them with manual annotations, or try a different web browser.
“If voters have any concerns, they have the option of downloading and printing their voting papers and completing them by hand.”
“When it comes to marking voting papers, as long as a voter’s intention is clear, their vote will be counted.”
The commission asked all voters to check their papers reflected their voting intentions before uploading them.
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