Debate over the Government's Senate voting reforms has resulted in a war of words between the Coalition and the Greens, who supported the reforms in the Senate, and Labor and some of the crossbench, who tried to block them.

The reforms, which have now passed through both houses, remove group voting tickets and allow voters to preference above the line, and were drafted in response to the result of the 2013 election in the Senate, which saw crossbenchers such as Victoria's Ricky Muir elected on a small proportion of the vote.

Opposition frontbencher Anthony Albanese referred to Senator Muir's support in an interview on ABC TV's Lateline on March 18, 2016.

"I tell you what, he got more votes than Michaelia Cash in the Senate, who got to be a minister in the Government," he said.

Fact Check found that a similar claim, made in a tweet by independent crossbencher John Madigan, was misleading.

The original claim

"Cash 'got more votes than Muir'," Senator Madigan claimed in a tweet on March 1, 2016.

Alongside this claim, Fact Check investigated another similar claim from crossbench Senator Glenn Lazarus, who claimed "Nearly 7000 Qlders voted for me personally. Matt Canavan (NAT), now a minister ONLY got 325 votes. Most crossbenchers received more votes!" in a tweet on February 26, 2016.

Senator Lazarus and Senator Madigan are both referring to the below the line vote for the candidates in 2013, the numbers for which indeed are correct.

However, experts contacted by Fact Check found that these below the line votes were largely irrelevant.

"A lot of these claims are technically true in terms of the candidate receiving that many votes below the line, but also totally irrelevant in assessing support for a person being elected for a range of reasons," psephologist Dr Kevin Bonham, from the University of Tasmania told Fact Check.

Graeme Orr, a professor of law at the University of Queensland told Fact Check: "Ultimately, under the existing system, no-one is elected because of the '1' personal votes: all are elected by the flow of preferences via party tickets."

The bottom line was that the overwhelming majority of people (96.5 per cent nationally) voted above the line in 2013, making the crossbench Senators' claims, as well as Mr Albanese's, misleading.