Toward a Forensic Analysis of Voting Systems

In election systems, there are many opportunities to incorporate forensic techniques and gather forensic evidence that can lead to determining the root cause of an anomaly. Although much has been written about security and forensic techniques in election systems, very little research has focused on measuring the forensic capabilities of election systems and mapping them to potential security safeguards. In this work a new metric is proposed, the Election Forensic Metric, to measure how well an election process protects itself and allows for comprehensive pre-and post-election audits. To test our theories we worked closely with our local government and borrowed two election machines to hold a mock election. We then applied our analysis and metric to generate recommendations for our local government.