Which voting system is named after Lewis Carroll's real surname?

The voting system named after Lewis Carroll’s real surname is Dodgson’s method.

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an Oxford mathematician, logician, and writer. In voting theory, Dodgson’s method seeks a candidate who is already a Condorcet winner—someone who defeats every other candidate in pairwise comparisons. If no such candidate exists, the method looks for the candidate who can become a Condorcet winner after the fewest adjacent swaps in voters’ rankings.

The system reflects Dodgson’s interest in practical election design, not his literary characters. He described the proposal in *A Method of Taking Votes on More Than Two Issues*, published in 1876. Its optimization problem can be computationally difficult, which makes the method important in social-choice theory as well as in the history of voting systems.

The Condorcet method is a tempting alternative because Dodgson’s method uses the Condorcet-winner idea, but they are not identical. Hare quota concerns proportional representation, while Borda count assigns points to ranked preferences.