With three Parties in the field in the 1890s, informal electoral pacts were adopted to cope with first past the post voting. In the period where Labor supported Reid's Free Trade Government, the two Parties avoided contesting seats held by the other. The demise of the Progressives after 1904 reduced politics to a two-party system, though many former Progressive MLAs remained in the Assembly as independent liberals. Other organisations such as the Temperance Alliance and the Farmers’ and Settlers’ Association chose to issue lists of preferred candidates in this period. The problem of competing conservative candidates dividing the non-Labor vote was dealt with by several experiments with the electoral system between 1910 and 1930. The first was the introduction of second ballots at the 1910 election. If the first ballot failed to produce a candidate with more than 50% of the vote, a second ballot was conducted one to three weeks later between the two leading candidates. This overcame the problem of competing anti-Labor candidates, but in practice revealed other problems. There were 26 second ballots between 1910 and 1920, and in 20 cases, the turnout increased at the second ballot. At the 1913 election, the increased turnout at the second ballot appeared largely responsible for Labor winning seats where Labor's vote had trailed the combined vote of non-Labor candidates on the first ballot. In this period, there were several attempts to establish a new Progressive Party. The split in the Labor Party over conscription resulted in the Liberal Party, Progressive and pro-conscription Labor MLAs coalescing into a new Nationalist Party. In the post-war period, the pressure for a separate Progressive Party was revived. The new party was in favour of proportional representation, the system introduced and used at the three elections in 1920, 1922 and 1925. Ballots were now to be marked with numbered preferences rather than ticks and crosses, mimicking the new Federal preferential system. The counting method adopted was similar to the Tasmanian Hare-Clark system, or the modern Senate system. The main difference was that candidates were listed in alphabetic order, not grouped by party. At the first election in 1920, preferences were compulsory, producing an informal vote of 9.7%. It was as high as 16% in Botany where voters were required to indicate 19 preferences. Preferences were made voluntary beyond the number of Members to be elected ahead of the 1922 election, reducing the informal vote to 3.6% in 1922 and 3.3% in 1925. Proportional representation proved unpopular with many Members. The parties were also unhappy with the finely divided Parliaments the system produced.