1918 Swan by-election  The 1918 Swan by-election was a by-election for the Division of Swan in the Australian House of Representatives, following the death of the sitting member Sir John Forrest. Held on 26 October 1918, the by-election led to the election of the youngest person to be elected until 2010 to the Parliament of Australia, Edwin Corboy. It saw the conservative vote split between the Country Party and the Nationalist Party, which directly prompted the introduction of preferential voting in Australia. Sir John Forrest, who had been the first Premier of Western Australia, was elected to the Australian House of Representatives for the Division of Swan at the first federal election on 29 March 1901. On 6 February 1918, Forrest was offered a place in the British peerage (he was to be created Baron Forrest of Bunbury), though the relevant letters patent had not at the time been issued. Forrest set out for England to accept the offer and take up his place in the House of Lords, but he died en route on 2 September 1918, off the coast of Sierra Leone, from cancer. Thus, a by-election was called to replace Forrest as the representative for Swan. By 1909, Australia had evolved a two-party system at the federal level, with the conservative Commonwealth Liberal Party and the progressive Australian Labor Party having both alternately won power via general election. This system was upset in November 1916, when the Labor party split over the issue of conscription; Prime Minister Billy Hughes and his pro-conscription supporters left the Labor party and formed a minority government as the "National Labor Party", before merging with the Liberals in February 1917 to form the Nationalist Party with Hughes as their leader. However, Hughes was distrusted by some on the conservative side of politics for his past involvement in socialist politics as Labor leader, and disaffected conservative farmers were moved to support the new Country Party, which had been formed in Western Australia in 1913 (and would be formed federally in 1922 from an amalgamation of state-based parties). At the time of the 1918 Swan by-election, Australia used a first past the post voting system, as was used in the United Kingdom, in all elections at the federal level. Under this system, the winner was simply the candidate with the highest numerical total of votes, regardless of whether it was a majority. The by-election was the first of what have come to be known in Australia as "three-cornered contests" with two anti-Labor parties both running candidates against Labor. The Nationalist candidate was William Hedges; Basil Murray was the Country Party candidate; Edwin Corboy was the Labor candidate, with William Watson standing as an independent.