All my papers have alphabetical author lists, but an award application asks for author lists to judge contribution I am a graduate student in pure math, namely graph theory and combinatorics. I have recently been nominated by my department to be the math department candidate for a university-wide research award. In the award application materials, it asks for my CV and is very specific that the authors names need to be in the same order as on the published paper so that the level of my involvement can be judged.

I am in a field where the convention is to put all names of co-authors alphabetically, regardless of input. It is clear to me that I need to mention this on my CV, but I am worried that if I just say that that the order of the authors is irrelevant in my field, the people judging my CV will be unsatisfied because then they won't have any information about how much I contributed to each paper.

Is there a tactful way to deal with this issue?
If you are concerned, you may want to include more information about the culture of coauthorship in mathematics.  For instance, you could enclose the following updated AMS culture statement.

As a mathematical "lifer," I want to be honest: the way that we handle coauthorship in mathematics does sometimes obscure the individual contributions of the authors.  On the job market, this is often circumvented by getting letters from one's senior coauthors describing the contributions you made.  You might consider doing that here, or that may be too heavy-handed for this case.

You could also talk to a mentor in your department and see what they think.  They may have more experience with what happens at the university level.