There is very little wrong with the Senate voting system at all. There has been a kneejerk reaction because a few "outsiders" managed to get elected (on 23 per cent of the vote). The changes commonly proposed, the threshold and above-the-line preferences, are designed to shut our third parties other then the Greens. When the major parties wake up to this, these "reforms' will go nowhere. For more, see my post at http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollbludger/2013/09/25/senate-call-of-the-board/?comment_page=6/#comments.

Well if the voting system does not represent the majority of voters' views or wishes, then clearly it must be changed.
At the moment, entrepreneurial preference exchanges, can result in the complete usurping of the majority will.
It's not the voters' fault that their intentions can be so massively manipulated or misrepresented in this way, with some candidates gaining senate seats/quotas, with as little as one percent of the primary votes?
The only way we the people can reverse this anomaly, is with the introduction of optional preferences.
In other words, the voter can choose whether or not to distribute any preferences, or where they would exhaust?
Meaning for example, they could just vote one or two, three or four or more, if that was their wish.
Only the voter should be able to chose their preferences, or where they would exhaust!
This would mean we could remove the undemocratic, above the line voting, which automatically distributes our preferences according to party aficionados, rather than the expressed wish of the voting vox populi!
Which alone has resulted in the current problematic outcomes; and or, patent misrepresentation.
One can see that some very minor parties have a lot to lose if optional preferencing wins the day, given it would decimate their numbers in the senate, and remove the possibility of a third force winning anything more than token representation in either house.
But particularly the Nats, who usually win many more seats than the greens, with just a fraction of the primary votes of the green party?
Even so, we see much of the resistance to the proposed reform coming from, as usual, the not very bright, single issue greens?
Who arguably have the most to gain from reform in this area!
Rhrosty.

Many of the changes that have been suggested are undemocratic. Their is no need to make it more expensive or require more members.
I have felt frustration with the present method, which has forced me to fill in below the line. All I need is to be able to fill in my preferences above the line opposite a party slate. I am not so keen on optional voting; under the system proposed there would be fewer parties anyway as the author suggests.
For God's sake get it done before the new Senate. I am sure that the Coalition and ALP can come to an agreement before then. After that Palmer will adopt blackmail, threatening to reject all legislation put up by the Government if there is a change to the voting.

Outrider

The Senate was created to ensure the states had a voice at the fed level and that big states can't steamroll the small ones. that fact that this isn't how it working is the issue rather than then the voting system.
Let’s just make each state leader nominate a person to represent that states interests and stop voting for the senate altogether.
We can then move to proportional voting for the lower house.

Rhrosty,

The voting system does “represent the majority of voters' views”. What people seem to have a lot of trouble understanding is that the micro-parties got 23 per cent of the national vote and thus deserve a seat in the Senate from each state. The fact that they used preferences to get there is neither there nor there. That is what the major parties have done for their number two and three candidates and the Greens have done for their number one candidates for decades. No one gets a Senate seat from a state until they reach 14.3 per cent of the vote. The vote they start on is irrelevant.

No one has to vote above the line. Everyone can choose to vote below the line if they wish. Everyone who has chosen to vote above the line has chosen the preference ticket of the party they have voted for, and contrary to the author of the article, these preference tickets are transparent as they are on the AEC website.

Outrider,

Section 7 of the Constitution requires that senator be “directly chosen by the people”. Forcing people to vote above the line would be unconstitutional because they would be prevented from “directly” choosing their senators, having instead to choose senators in an order predetermined by a party. Making it an option is not unconstitutional, but it is contrary to the spirit of the Constitution.

There is no reason that the AEC cannot provide an app for voters to use at home to produce a personal how-to-vote card that does not miss any numbers.

There is also a case for optional preferences below the line after a certain number, provided that number is high enough to preserve the proportional nature of the single transferable vote system, which is what we have. Making that number the number of seats to be filled would not work as it would lock preferences up inside the one party and thus undermine the proportional nature of the system.

Chris C
Thanks for your contribution. I think you're helping to throw light on something that's fairly complex. I even suspect that certain people want the issue clouded and complex so they can put the wool over our eyes. I think you understand the issues better than the author of the article.

I also don't see what's so wrong with the current system. 

However, could you explain why you say the major parties would block the reforms when the major parties would stand to benefit from the reforms?

Outrider,
“For God's sake get it done before the new Senate. I am sure that the Coalition and ALP can come to an agreement before then. After that Palmer will adopt blackmail, threatening to reject all legislation put up by the Government if there is a change to the voting.”
Gee, democracy in action. We don’t like the new crop of representatives just voted in with a system we have used for 30 years, so quick, change the system before the new Senators can exercise their democratic right to stop you.

I find it amazing how the major parties, Coalition, Labor and Greens, who have lost out in the recent election, can create this smoke and mirrors scare that the electoral system is no longer democratic as the wrong people are winning seats because they are single issue candidates, or had little primary vote, or were previously unknown, or somehow “gamed” the system as though they were a computer hacker breaking into a bank.

There is nothing wrong with group voting tickets because every party arranges them to maximize their chances and if every party supporter “blindly” allows that preference in their name it is only to grant their party the better chance of success. As has been said above, if approx. 20% of voters don’t support major parties and approx 20% of seats are won by minor parties, is there really any discrepancy there

Dan,

It is a source of great frustration to me that people who don’t know what they are talking about get so much coverage. The reporting on the Gonski report is a classic case, in which only one journalist in the country correctly reported that it had recommended keeping the Howard government’s SES funding model, even though this fact leapt off the page the day the report was released, and it took him 13 months to do so. We see a similar thing with the discussion of Senate voting “reform”, when journalist after journalist fails to call on the natural scepticism of the profession to ask any insightful questions. Assumption just follows assumption.

The Greens are certainly trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes, and succeeding because of journalistic gullibility. The Greens are pushing for above-the-line preferences, saying that this will put the voter in charge, when it does no such thing as it makes voters follow the preference order within each party. Bob Brown even suggested banning below-the-line votes completely (http://www.theage.com.au/comment/how-to-reform-senate-voting-in-one-easy-step-20130910-2ti5a.html), contrary to Section 7 of the Constitution. Journalists act like the Greens’ case is self-evident, rather than self-seeking.

The Greens are not pushing for a threshold (4 or 5 per cent has been suggested), but that too would advantage them by knocking all the parties below it out of the race, a contemptible way to treat people who have voted for micro-parties.

The initial reaction was outrage at the micro-parties’ success. However, I expect the major parties will block any reforms designed to advantage the Greens by making it harder for other parties to win seats as the major parties do not want to give the Greens a lock on the balance of power in the Senate. Both the Coalition and the Labor Party want the option of helping parties other than the Greens, so they are hardly likely to support a voting system that makes this course of action more difficult.