α. 1900s– voterama.
β. 1900s– vote-a-rama, 1900s– vote-o-rama.
vote-a-raman.
/ˌvəʊtəˈrɑːmə/, U.S. /ˌvoʊdəˈrɑmə/ 1. U.S. An event held with the aim of registering many people to vote. Now rare.
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1955 Holland (Mich.) Evening Sentinel 4 Oct. 8/3 The project, called Voterama, is aimed especially at voters who have reached their 21st birthday since the last election.
1958 Chicago Defender 26 July 22/1 The Vote-o-Rama will be conducted in both counties to encourage Negroes to register and vote in this years' governor's election.
1983 Afro-Amer. 15 Oct. 3/1 The Los Angeles branch of the NAACP is holding a ‘voterama’..with the objective of doubling the number of registered voters.
2004 Washington Post (Electronic ed.) 19 July a1 She and other Americans were holding ‘vote-o-ramas’ in the Netherlands.
2. In the U.S. Senate: a session of voting following the allotted time for official debate of a budget resolution, in which any remaining amendments to the resolution are proposed and voted on in rapid succession.Amendments are often proposed during a vote-a-rama chiefly as a means of making a political statement, rather than of garnering votes.Possibly attested earlier in an article from the Dow Jones News Service dated 24 May 1995, but this date cannot be verified.
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1996 Congress. Daily (Nexis) 22 May The ‘vote-a-rama’, a term used by Senate Majority Whip Lott, will begin this morning, and is expected to stretch through most of the day.
2003 Washington Post (Electronic ed.) 26 Mar. a1 The vote came as a surprise in the midst of a day-long ‘vote-o-rama’ on several dozen amendments.
2017 M. S. Lynch et al. in J. R. Straus & M. Glassman Party & Procedure in U.S. Congr. (ed. 2) iii. xi. 226 A key feature of the vote-a-rama is rapid-fire voting with essentially no debate between votes.
This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, June 2020; most recently modified version published online December 2021).
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n.1955