The author has no understanding of the principles of the single transferable vote or of the Constitution.

Senate voting has not become an “undemocratic and complex mess” at all.

It is not “clearly more democratic for Senators to be selected by the highest number of voters directly supporting them”.

“The abolition of below the line voting” would be unconstitutional.

All that has happened is that the insiders are angry that the public dared to elect some outsiders.

Stephen Conroy of the ALP (with 780 votes or 0.03 per cent), Julian McGauran of the National Party (with 1190 or 0.04 per cent) and Judith Troeth of the Liberal Party (with 829 or 0.03 per cent) were all elected in 2004, yet no one objected to those three getting into the Senate on preferences. Bridget McKenzie of the National Party was elected in 2010 from an initial 1045 votes (or 0.03 per cent of the vote). No one objected to that. The fact that their preferences came from within their own group is irrelevant. The single transferable vote is designed to elect individuals, as required by Section 7 of the Constitution, which states senators must be “directly” elected. Under STV, all votes are equal. The vote of someone who supports a minor candidate is not of less value than the vote of someone who supports a major candidate. That voter is entitled to have his or her vote remain in the count until the end. To exclude it or discount it because it went to a minor party candidate is the antithesis of democracy.

Those who want a longer discussion can find it in my post at
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollbludger/2013/09/25/senate-call-of-the-board/?comment_page=6/#comments.

This is something I more or less advocated just after the last election!
It makes perfect sense, but particularly compared to the dogs breakfast we get, when you combine proportional representation and a quota system, to a preferential system; and results never ever intended by those who crafted our constitution.
Nor should it be constitutional for someone receiving 0.1 of a quota, to be placed ahead of someone receiving 9.9 or thereabouts, in clear defiance of voters' intentions.
We have an established precedent for optional preferencing, with a number of Queensland elections.
However, I do believe, we can't run optional preferences in one part of an election and continue to impose compulsory perferencing, within the rest of the ballot.
It would be far less difficult to police and or count, if all preferencing where optional, and exhausted with the individual voters intentions?
Meaning, they could chose to just vote one, or see their personal perferencing exhaust at say three, or at the bottom of the ballot paper?
Ballots could be then counted, by simply counting those with a single mark first!
In effect, that's what optional preferencing, as I understand it, actually means!
At one time there were no above the line voting for the senate, so changing it back to below the line only, and simplifying it with an optional preference, is hardly unconstitutional!?
The desirable consequence would be all those joke parties, would lose all interest in contesting for contesting sake, or just to spread their preference to another party?
Which is a clever way of manipulating the voting intentions of the masses, in ways they would not otherwise tolerate, if fully informed or aware!
Rhrosty.

There is a horrendously complex mathematical analysis of elections; which I am making no claim to understand the technical arguments. However, according to Wikipedia and other references yielded by a Google search, Ken Arrow presented a theorem as long ago as 1951. Dubbed the impossibility theorem, which states given three or more candidates a fair and just result is impossibility.
Fairness is of course defined by Arrow in mathematical terms. Strict electoral fairness may be impossible. Yet adhoc changes can be made to correct perceived abuse. The last Senate election was manifestly unfair.
My own view the simpler system is the better. Which means “first past the post” has its attractions. In the case of a half Senate election voters should number their preferences 1 to 6. This precludes any preference deals.

I am comfortable with minor parties and independent senators, but I would like Senators to have a reasonable level of support wherever they come from. I also think it is wrong to have a system that is incomprehensible to the vast majority of the electorate, and presumably electoral experts too, as I don't recall any of them predicting the Palmer Party Senators or those from the micro-parties. Having Senators who hardly anyone voted for or wanted to have elected, or voted for by mistake, means that we don't regard the Senate as representing us. My prediction is that amendments to Electoral Act will be a priority for the Government. I just hope they bring back optional preferential voting for the Reps too and align federal and state voting systems. The level of informal votes was appalling especially in electorates with high proportions of non-English speaking migrants, who seem to be disenfranchised by an unnecessarily rigid demand for preferences to be shown for all candidates. We used to get by very well when optional preferential voting was allowed, even though we weren't meant to talk about it!

After my last post I decided to look up the AEC results for the electorate of Fairfax, which Clive Palmer has won (pending confirmation by a recount) by seven seats. There were 4,506 informal votes cast in Fairfax. I wonder how many of those were just marked for, say, Clive Palmer - a clear expression of intent which is now deemed invalid because both Labor and LibNats want to enforce strict preferential voting for their benefit, not ours.