The mathematical method that could offer a fairer way to vote

ALICE WAS soaked. So was the Mouse, the Eaglet, the Dodo and all the other bedraggled creatures that emerged from the pool of tears Alice had shed at the bottom of the rabbit-hole. After the Mouse tried talking them out of their sogginess with the “driest” speech he knew, the Dodo proposed “more energetic remedies”. Alice and the animals began racing around a circle, with no start or finish line, and no obvious winner. It was, the Dodo said, a “caucus-race”.

The puzzling race described in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” is a piece of political satire smuggled into a children’s tale. The book’s author, Lewis Carroll, took a keen interest in the quirks of electoral contests. He would later write a treatise on “the dust and din” of Britain’s 19th-century voting reforms, under his real name, Charles Dodgson. (The animals’ huffing and puffing may also mock the circuitous deliberations of Christ Church College, Oxford, where Carroll spent his life, often locking horns with the dean, father of a real-life Alice.) Most election pundits lavish vast attention on the political creatures in the competition and the prizes they might win. But Carroll was different. A mathematician and logician, he turned his eccentric intelligence to the rules of the race.