16 Holiday specials The Economist December 18th 2021
afairerwaytovote?T HE PUBLIC
S QUARED
A
lice wassoaked. 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 rabbithole. After the Mouse tried talk
ing 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 “caucusrace”.
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 19thcentury 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.
To most, this is the driest subject in politics. But the
rules of the race can change the course of nations.
The rules of the race helped dictate the outcome of
two of the most consequential votes in recent history:
the election of Donald Trump as the Republicans’ pres
idential nominee in 2016 and Britain’s vote to leave the
European Union in the same year. In each case, the
rules of the race seemed straightforward, common
sensical and unobjectionable. Both produced a clear
winner. But what if the rules had been switched? What
if the Brexit referendum had looked more like the
primary, and the primary more like the referendum?
In the primaries, each voter picked one candidate
and the contender with the most votes won. It is a
method so familiar as to almost defy examination.
And yet its disadvantages have long been recognised.
Back in 1873, Carroll lamented its “extraordinary injus
tice”. Imagine, he wrote, if one of four candidates is the
first choice of 36% of voters but hated by everybody
else. Another is the first choice of a slightly smaller
percentage but the second choice of everyone else. The
second candidate should win. But the rules of the race
would conspire in favour of the first.
In the Republican primary, opposition to Mr Trump
was fragmented among numerous rival candidates—
as many as 11 in the early contests. A different set of
rules might have winnowed the field earlier to leave
Mr Trump facing a single opponent, such as John Kas
ich, hated by none, liked by many, but the first choice
of few. That would have made the primary more akin
to a straightup yesno referendum on Mr Trump’s
candidacy. In that case, some polls suggest, he might
have lost the race.
The result of the Brexit referendum would also
have been different if the myriad versions of Brexit
(modelled on Australia, Norway, Switzerlandand so
on) had been pitted against Remain and each other.
Opposition to the euwould have been fragmented
among many alternatives. And Remain would have tri
umphed like Mr Trump.
Some people think Brexit was an example of a vot
ing paradox almost as surreal as the Dodo’s caucus
race. Of the three broad options—Remain, hard BrexitThe intellectual roots of a new democratic vision