A Langer vote was a style of voting in the Australian electoral system designed to avoid the requirement to express preferences for all candidates without the vote being rejected as informal. The title is a tribute to Albert Langer, an Australian political activist, who advocated for the use of this style as a de facto method of optional preferential voting for making a valid vote for the voter's preferred candidates while the deliberate "error" avoided the vote being counted for one of the major political parties. Voters were advised to mark 1, 2, . .n, for favoured candidates, but to mark a repetition of the next digit against each of the remaining candidates. For example, a vote would be marked 1, 2, 3, 3, 3. The votes for the first and second candidates would be counted but the remaining candidates would then not receive preferences. From 1983 this was a valid vote, however since 1998 the Electoral Act requires that there be no repeated numbers. This type of voting would not merely be an individual act of conscience however. Its systemic effect could have been anarchic, given the way the preferential voting system was structured: in any close seats between the dominant Labor and Liberal Parties, had enough voters chosen to put the candidates of those parties equal last, no member would have been elected for those seats. This is due to Australian law requiring an MP for a single-member constituency or seat to have an absolute majority of all valid votes cast, after preferences, to be declared elected. This would have required fresh elections in those seats, and if enough had been affected, formation of government may have been destabilised. History Preferential voting was introduced in Federal elections in 1918. While voting was voluntary at the time, a valid vote was required to express a preference for every candidate, described as full preferential voting, and a failure to mark ballots in consecutive numerical order meant that the vote was informal. This was confirmed by the High Court in a case concerning the 1928 election. This was a half senate election in which 3 senators were to be elected for Victoria. 6 candidates were nominated, however Maj Gen John Forsyth died before the ballot. Most ballot papers were reprinted with just the 5 remaining candidates. The Labor how-to-vote card had Forsyth listed as #5 and more than 11,000 ballots had