Council, the South Australian Legislative Council and the Western Australian Legislative Council), voters can express an order of preferences for parties by voting '1', '2' and so on in different boxes "above the line". The scope of a number above the line is merely the list of candidates for that party, so Group Voting Tickets are no longer used in those elections. The party supplies a list of its candidates to the Australian Electoral Commission, New South Wales Electoral Commission, Electoral Commission of South Australia or Western Australian Electoral Commission before the election. All four jurisdictions have limited optional preferential voting, which enables voters to number as many boxes as they choose, but the number only applies to the registered party list. History Voting is compulsory in all Australian jurisdictions for all houses of Parliament. Complete preferences voting was the only option available for the Australian Senate and the upper houses of other jurisdictions. With proportional representation and preferential voting, it was daunting for many voters to have to fill in scores of boxes on the ballot paper. Some voters would choose their early preferences and then vote for other candidates in the order they appeared on the ballot paper—known as a donkey vote; or fill in the form incorrectly, leading to an informal vote. To ease this task, the GVT option was introduced to permit voters to choose one party or group, and all the remaining squares were deemed to be filled in according to a registered party ticket. Group voting tickets were introduced for elections for the Australian Senate by the Hawke Government to reduce the number of invalid votes by simplifying the voting system for the Senate. Under the new system a voter cast a valid vote if they placed a single mark above the line instead of the scores on a typical Senate ballot paper. It was first used at the 1984 federal election. For the Australian Senate, the rate of informal voting was reduced from around 9% before 1984, to around 3%. Group voting tickets were introduced in South Australia in 1985 in New South Wales and Western Australia in 1987 and in Victoria in 1988. Following the use of tactical preference tickets and the record number of minor parties contesting the 1999 NSW election for the New South Wales Legislative Council, a modified form of "above the line" voting was introduced for the 2003