ElectoramaNews/2025-December

Audio version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzsNd9DFaH4

Happy holidays, y’all! Welcome to the first edition of the ElectoramaNews, covering December 2025. This issue of ElectoramaNews provides a basic outline for future newsletters, while sprinkling in some of the news from earlier in the year. It mainly focuses on online conversations; future editions will hopefully focus more on movement progress toward policy changes. This edition highlights the “ElectoramaCall“, a new monthly video call for leaders in the electoral-reform space, and provides an activity summary of prominent electoral reform forums (e.g. the /r/EndFPTP subreddit).

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 the occasional Australian, 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.

The /r/EndFPTP subreddit on reddit.com is a very active forum for discussing electoral reform, and frequent posters seem to come from all corners of the reform movement. Below Is a list of some of the posts on EndFPTP. N.B.: this 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.

• 2025-12-30 20:51:45
  • title: Linear cardinal multi winner methods?
  • body: Title, are there any cardinal methods with multiple winners with linear computation? Sequential methods like spav seem to rely on re counting after each winner which seems like it could blow up in time
  • user: /u/karmics______; score: 1
  • url: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pztf35/linear_cardinal_multi_winner_methods/
  • 1 comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pztf35
• 2025-12-28 14:34:06
  • title: I built an Agent-Based Model in Python to simulate how Electoral Systems influence Separatism and Civil War risk. Here are the results. (I need you to find the reason for close pr stv)
  • body: If you disagree with this conclusion, I’d really appreciate specific, actionable critique: please point out exactly where you think the model breaks—whether it’s in the assumptions, the metric/formula, or the input data. I’m happy to revise the analysis i… ([[1]])
  • user: /u/mercurygermes; score: 10
  • url: https://i.redd.it/9uthbcu9hy9g1.png
  • 2 comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pxsqls
• 2025-12-23 21:47:49
  • title: Idea: Lazy MMP
  • body: Probably not the best name for this system. I’m also pretty sure somewhere already uses/used something like this, but I couldn’t track down where I saw it. Whether it even qualifies as lazy is a question in itself. The system (which can be implemented in … ([[2]])
  • user: /u/Additional-Kick-307; score: 1
  • url: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pu63jn/idea_lazy_mmp/
  • 3 comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pu63jn
• 2025-12-22 20:19:47
  • title: Idea: A framework to convert any single-winner method into PR?
  • body: After learning about Sequential Monroe voting, I think I’ve came up with a general framework that can theoretically turn any single-winner method (let’s call it Method X) into a multi-winner prop… ([[3]])
  • user: /u/No-Vast7006; score: 1
  • url: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pt9u3t/idea_a_framework_to_convert_any_singlewinner/
  • 15 comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pt9u3t
• 2025-12-19 22:28:40
  • title: Fairness of STV when parties run multiple candidates ?
  • body: Edit: thank you to Pantherkittysoftware who pointed me towards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPO-STV which is a system designed to overcome some of the problems I talked about, specifically how STV may result in lone ‘maverick’ candidates being eliminat… ([[4]])
  • user: /u/ravencrowed; score: 2
  • url: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pqyaha/fairness_of_stv_when_parties_run_multiple/
  • 49 comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pqyaha
• 2025-12-17 11:44:12
  • title: My Framework for Electoral Design: Internalize Political Externalities
  • body: I believe in the power of the “invisible hand”: in many cases, dispersed self-interest can be steered—through institutions and incentives—toward socially efficient outcomes. But this belief has a hard precondition: **external costs must be internalize… ([[5]])
  • user: /u/Previous_Word_3517; score: 1
  • url: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pouhxm/my_framework_for_electoral_design_internalize/
  • 7 comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pouhxm
• 2025-12-12 20:40:49
  • title: Utah SD 11 Special Approval Voting Results
  • body: Some pretty interesting results. Average of 1.74 candidates approved. In addition, it seems like there were no two clear “frontrunners,” and the winner got close to 50% while having a lead over others, making the results showcase a similar approval for al… ([[6]])
  • user: /u/Ibozz91; score: 36
  • url: https://i.redd.it/9ag1zbos3u6g1.png
  • 13 comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pl2k48
• 2025-12-11 16:57:51
  • title: From Texas Gridlock to Utah’s Blueprint: A Tale of Two States and Redistricting Reform
  • user: /u/ILikeNeurons; score: 6
  • url: https://electionscience.org/newsroom/from-texas-gridlock-to-utah%E2%80%99s-blueprint-a-tale-of-two-states-and-redestricting-reform
  • 1 comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pk2m70
• 2025-12-10 22:27:43
  • title: Expert committees purged by low voter turnout
  • body: I’ve been working on a thought experiment that uses a novel voting mechanism for accountability. The core mechanic is that expert committees are automatically replaced if a specific measure of public trust falls below a threshold. I’m posting here because… ([[7]])
  • user: /u/Agitates; score: 0
  • url: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pjgm4o/expert_committees_purged_by_low_voter_turnout/
  • 3 comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pjgm4o
• 2025-12-10 21:34:39
  • title: Condorcet Cycle in the wild – 2021 Minneapolis City Council Ward 2
  • user: /u/Antagonist_; score: 20
  • url: https://ranked.vote/report/us/mn/2021/11/ward-2
  • 42 comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pjfaax
• 2025-12-10 20:23:23
  • title: Is there a better way to market Condorcet-IRV hybrids than just saying Condorcet IRV?
  • body: I know IRV is also known as Ranked Choice Voting, but what about Condorcet? Or Smith? Or Woodall, Benham, TidemanAlt etc? How would we name them as household names? My guess is to name them “Top Cycle Ranked Choice Voting” but that’s too long. Doesnt soun… ([[8]])
  • user: /u/SidTheShuckle; score: 9
  • url: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pjdg8w/is_there_a_better_way_to_market_condorcetirv/
  • 37 comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pjdg8w
• 2025-12-10 16:54:43
  • title: Schwarzenegger blasts redistricting ‘war’
  • body: He kinda pointed out yhe problem eith FPTP
  • user: /u/SamsonOccom; score: 4
  • url: https://youtube.com/shorts/72FxgVVmo_I?si=Wg43fClFSOruASVR
  • 4 comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pj7q8n
• 2025-12-09 22:59:40
  • title: Shaky political “science” misses mark on ranked choice voting
  • body: In this study, co-author Paul Haughey and I assess the quality and credibility of 41 different studies on RCV. We note a disturbing pattern. A number of misleading studies, including by well-known political scientists, fall well short of real “science.” … ([[9]])
  • user: /u/DemocracyWorks1776; score: 30
  • url: https://open.substack.com/pub/democracysos/p/shaky-political-science-misses-mark?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
  • 12 comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pim4fq
• 2025-12-06 07:39:42
  • title: Economist article on FPTP: “Britain’s slot-machine politics”
  • body: The article is fairly critical of FPTP, focusing on how things get random when you have multiple parties. That’s just one of many criticisms of FPTP, obviously, but a good sign when a newspaper like The Economist is writing articles like this. Behind a p… ([[10]])
  • user: /u/Dystopiaian; score: 20
  • url: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/12/04/britains-slot-machine-politics
  • 7 comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pfjkgz
• 2025-12-04 04:05:45
  • title: Score Then Automatic Runoff (STAR) Voting Used For First Time In Election For Public Office to Elect Astoria City Council Member!
  • body: “On Monday, city councilors interviewed Conklin and the other applicants during a public meeting. The councilors listened to public comments from attendees and then used a “score then automatic runoff” (or STAR) voting system to narrow the field to the to… ([[11]])
  • user: /u/Stunning_Walrus6276; score: 62
  • url: https://mailchi.mp/equal.vote/star-elects-astoria-city-councilor
  • 8 comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pdq6h5
• 2025-12-03 13:46:36
  • title: Ranked choice voting outperforms the winner-take-all system used to elect nearly every US politician
  • body: When it comes to how palatable a different voting system is, how does RCV fair compared to other types? I sometimes have a hard time wrapping my head around all the technical terms I see in this sub, but it makes me wonder if other types of voting could r… ([[12]])
  • user: /u/12lbTurkey; score: 139
  • url: https://theconversation.com/ranked-choice-voting-outperforms-the-winner-take-all-system-used-to-elect-nearly-every-us-politician-267515
  • 138 comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pd4la9
• 2025-12-03 02:19:15
  • title: How do I refute the argument that Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem prove electoral systems are the “worst” system?
  • body: The person I’m debating claims that Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem prove that electoral systems are mathematically broken and therefore are the worst possible way to govern. His proposed solution is a system w… ([[13]])
  • user: /u/No-Vast7006; score: 6
  • url: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pcrys8/how_do_i_refute_the_argument_that_arrows/
  • 31 comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1pcrys8

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.

• URLs:
  • https://VotingTheory.org
• News:
  • (fill me in…)

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”.

• URLs for approval-voting organizations:
  • https://electionscience.org
• News:
  • Colorado — Manny Rutinel, who is a current member of the Colorado State Congress, is running as a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, and explicitly (and publicly) supports approval voting. He lists it under “stopping corruption” on his official campaign website.
  • Maryland — Reintroducing legislation for 2026
  • Utah — CES notes recent use of approval voting in Utah in the CES news feed.
  • NAACP’s call for voting reform that includes RCV/IRV and Approval Voting:
    • https://naacp.org/resources/states-voting-rights-act

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.”

• URLs for RCV/IRV organizations:
  • https://fairvote.org
• News:
  • (fill me in)

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.

• URLs for EVC/STAR organizations:
  • https://equal.vote
  • https://www.starvoting.org/
• News: website launches in 2025
  • https://bettervoting.com
  • https://realrcv.equal.vote/

Better Choices for Democracy is a new organization that officially launched 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“.

• URLs
  • https://betterchoices.vote
• News: BCD has launched a new web app for conducting online polls:
  • https://ccv-app.netlify.app/

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:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChangesLinked/Category:Electoral_systems
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChangesLinked/Category:Psephology
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChangesLinked/Category:Voting_theory
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChangesLinked/Template:Voting_criteria_table
• (fill me in)

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 in December, it would seem that User:RobLa and User:Dr. Edmonds were the most active editors (e.g. 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:

• November:
  • http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2025-November/date.html
• December:
  • http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2025-December/date.html

Here’s the December activity on the EM list:

• The first (only?) Electorama call: December 17 — Rob Lanphier
• The first (only?) Electorama call: December 17 — robert bristow-johnson
• The first (only?) Electorama call: December 17 — Rob Lanphier
  
• ElectoramaNews(?) — Rob Lanphier
• ElectoramaNews(?) — robert bristow-johnson
• ElectoramaNews(?) — Rob Lanphier
  
• Classical music countdown balloting — Joseph Malkevitch
  
• Classical music countdown balloting — Rob Lanphier
  
• Classical music countdown balloting — Kristofer Munsterhjelm
  
• Classical music countdown balloting — Joseph Malkevitch
  
• Classical music countdown balloting — Joseph Malkevitch
  
• Classical music countdown balloting — Kristofer Munsterhjelm
  
• An unusual “absolving” PR method — Kristofer Munsterhjelm
  
• An unusual “absolving” PR method — Etjon Basha
  
• An unusual “absolving” PR method — Kristofer Munsterhjelm
  
• An unusual “absolving” PR method — Etjon Basha
  
• The “Electorama Call” and “ElectoramaNews” — Rob Lanphier
  
• A quick and dirty strength of victory measure for LIIA methods — Kristofer Munsterhjelm
  
• Countdown — Joseph Malkevitch
  
• Countdown — Kristofer Munsterhjelm
  
• The ElectionNews draft newsletter — Rob Lanphier
  

The election-software mailing list (a.k.a. the “ES list”) has been pretty quiet, other than User:RobLa‘s promotion of the “ElectoramaCall“.

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.

This is a misc pile of links that your editor didn’t find time to summarize…

• Orgs
  • Secure Internet Voting (https://siv.org)
  • Respect Voters Coalition (https://respectvoters.org)
• Misc links submitted during ElectoramaCall in December 2025:
  • Robert Bristow-Johnson’s submitted paper for Constitutional Political Economy:
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jIhFQfEoxSdyRz5SqEjZotbVDx4xshwM/view
  • One page primer (talking points) on “precinct summability“:
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YtejO54DSOFRkHBGryS9pbKcBM7u1jTS/view
  • 2022 Letter to Governor Phil Scott of Vermont about H.744 from 2021:
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Niss1nWjbsb63rPeKTKLT7S2KVDZIo7G/view
  • Templates for plausible legislative language implementing Ranked-Choice Voting:
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DGvs2F_YoKcbl2SXzCcfm3nEMkO0zCbR/view
  • Partha Dasgupta and Eric Maskin 2004 Scientific American article “The Fairest Vote of All”:
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m6qn6Y7PAQldKNeIH2Tal6AizF7XY2U4/view
  • Articles regarding the Alaska RCV election in August 2022 that suffered a similar majority failure:
    https://legislature.vermont.gov/Documents/2024/WorkGroups/House%20Government%20Operations/Bills/S.32/Witness%20Documents/S.32~Eric%20Maskin~Washington%20Post%20Article,%20Opinion-%20Alaska’s%20ranked-choice%20voting%20is%20flawed,%20but%20there’s%20an%20easy%20fix.%20~4-18-2023.pdf
  • Benham’s method
  • Text for tabled bill in Vermont:
    https://legislature.vermont.gov/bill/status/2024/H.424
• News
  • (fill me in)

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The ElectoramaNews is a monthly publication. Next month’s edition will be drafted publicly here: ElectoramaNews/2026-January. If you wish to suggest changes or additions to the publication, please contact User:RobLa, or (better yet) sign up for an electowiki account and make the changes you would like to see prior to publication.