Hi folks,

Before I blast this out to a wider audience, I'd like to send my draft to this mailing list.  It's included below and at the following link:
https://electowiki.org/wiki/ElectoramaNews/2025-December

I haven't summarized what's been going on on the EM list, which maybe we should.  What does everyone thing the most notable discussions have been this month?  This year?

Rob
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Happy holidays, y'all! This is the first (and maybe only) version of the ElectoramaNews, covering December 2025. Actually, since this is the first edition, this may end up becoming a "year-in-review" newsletter. The newsletter hasn't yet been published (as of 2025-12-05), so it's difficult to say what will be in here.

This issue of ElectoramaNews provides a basic outline for future newsletters, while sprinkling in some of the news from December 2025. It mainly focuses on online conversations; future editions will hopefully focus more on movement progress. This edition highlights the "ElectoramaCall", a new monthly video call. It also provides a summary of every post to the /r/EndFPTP subreddit in December. Other forums may get more coverage as activity picks up on each of them.

Section01 -- Main feature: the "ElectoramaCall"

User:RobLa hosted a video call (the "ElectoramaCall") on December 17 with leaders in the electoral-reform space. One product of that conversation was a goal to publish a monthly newsletter. We also resolved to have monthly conversations, which are currently slated for a similar time each month (more on that in a bit).

The discussion (at first) was intended to have conversations similar to those in Sass's Open Democracy Discussion, but at a different time of day. Sass's call sometimes enjoys the attendance of an Australian or two, which is easier to imagine when it's noon in Sydney than it is for Europeans attending when it's well past midnight in Paris. However, timezone differences aren't the only reason why some folks hope we have a regular call. There have frequently been debates between the "cardinal camp" (folks that like approval voting, range/score voting, and STAR voting) and the "ordinal camp" (folks that advocate for systems that work best with a ranked ballot, like instant-runoff voting and Condorcet methods). Many folks in these two camps are deeply disrespectful of folks in the opposing camp, which is something that might get incrementally better if the two camps have mutually respectful discussions with one another on a regular basis.

If you would like to join the January call (slated for Wednesday, January 21 at 2pm Pacific Time), please RSVP to User:RobLa, and he will add you to the meeting invitation.

Section02 -- reddit EndFPTP update

the /r/EndFPTP subreddit on reddit.com is a very active forum for discussing electoral reform, and frequent posters seem to come from all quarters of the reform movement (both the cardinal camp and the ordinal camp post here). Below Is a list of some of the posts on EndFPTP. As of this writing on December 14, it is a mostly unedited collection of posts pulled from reddit using a vibecoded script along with some haphazard manual coalition and adaptation to MediaWiki format. There are likely gaps in the coverage due to when and how RobLa ran the script.

Section03 -- Voting Theory Forum update

The Voting Theory Forum is a popular watering hole for many folks in the electoral-reform. The activity on this website seems to have simmered down from it's early days (in 2020 and 2021), but there are still frequently notable discussions here.

Section04 -- Center for Election Science updates

This newsletter intends to track the major electoral-reform organizations, and the Center for Election Science (CES) is one of them. CES is largely focused on approval voting as their preferred method, but they support other reforms. One can presumably follow the latest things going on with them by following them on Twitterx.com or by consulting their "Newsroom".

Section05 -- FairVote updates

Of course, if we're going to talk about big organizations in electoral reform, we have to talk about FairVote. They also have an x.com profile and a "newsroom" of sorts, from which the latest thing (as of December 15) is an editorial about gerrymandering and asserts "We can end gerrymandering. We can create a nation where every district is a swing district."

Section06 -- Equal Vote Coalition/STAR Action updates

The big news for the Equal Vote Coalition and STAR Action is the news from Astoria. The EVC/STAR folks have not one but two x.com accounts they post things to: @5starvoting and @TheEqualVote.

Section07 -- Better Choices for Democracy

Better Choices for Democracy is a new organization that officially launhed in November 2025. They are focused on Condorcet methods; specifically, what they call "Consensus Choice Voting". The latest news from the BCD newsroom is a video editorial from University of Maryland Professor Eric Pacuit titled "Consensus Choice Explained: Head-to-Head Voting vs Plurality & Ranked Choice".

Section08 -- Wikipedia updates

There has been a lot of editing happening on election-method articles and adjacent articles on English Wikipedia. Here's a few feeds that one can look at to see some of the latest changes:

Section09 -- Electorama/electowiki/EM/ES/abif

electowiki is still the most prominent wiki associated with electoral reform that User:RobLa knows about (other than English Wikipedia). Looking at the RecentChanges feed for electowiki, it would seem that User:RobLa has been the most active editor in December (as of December 15), but User:Dr. Edmonds made some changes to the Sequentially Shrinking Quota article. Back in November, User:Kristomun and User:Dr. Edmonds were more active than User:RobLa, with changes to the "Sequentially Spent Score" article and the "Kotze-Pereira transformation" article, among others. Also, User:RodCrosby resumed work on their QPR2 article.

The election-methods mailing list (a.k.a. the "EM list") has seen modest activity in November and December:

The election-software mailing list (a.k.a. the "ES list") has been pretty quiet, other than User:RobLa's promotion of the "Electorama Call" happening on December 17.

Activity on ABIF, abiftool, and the ABIF Web Tool (awt) has been relatively quiet, though there was a little performance/caching work on awt in November.

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Section10 -- additional items/other orgs