compulsory to attend the polling place and have your name marked off and this has been upheld by a number of legal decisions." Yet, practically, it remains the fact that having received a ballot paper, the elector can simply fold it up and put it into the ballot box without formally marking it, if the elector objects, in principle, to casting a vote. However, the consistently low number of informal votes each election indicates that having attended, had his or her name marked off, very few electors then choose not to vote formally. Proponents of compulsory voting have promoted theoretical "benefits", such as the difficulty for coercion to be used to prevent disadvantaged people (the old, illiterate or disabled) to vote, and for obstacles to be put in the way of classes of individuals (ethnic/coloured; either registration requirements or placement of voting booths) as often happens under other voting systems. They also suggest jury duty and compulsory military service as vastly more onerous citizen's compulsions than attending a local voting booth once every few years. Ranked (or preferential) voting Australia uses various forms of ranked voting for almost all elections. Under this system, voters number the candidates on the ballot paper in the order of their preference. The preferential system was introduced for federal elections in 1918, in response to the rise of the Country Party, a party representing small farmers. The Country Party was seen to have split the anti-Labor vote in conservative country areas, allowing Labor candidates to win on a minority vote. The conservative federal government of Billy Hughes introduced preferential voting as a means of allowing competition between the two conservative parties without putting seats at risk. It was first used in the form of instant-runoff voting at the Corangamite by-election on 14 December 1918. The system was first used for election for the Queensland Parliament in 1892. In the form of Single transferable voting, ranked voting was introduced in the Tasmanian House of Assembly in 1906 as a result of the work of Andrew Inglis Clark and Catherine Helen Spence, building on the original concept invented in 1859 by Briton Thomas Hare. Preferential voting has gradually extended to both upper and lower houses, in the federal, state and territory legislatures, and is also used in municipal elections, and most other kinds of elections as well, such as internal political party elections, trade union elections, church