Election forensics is a field of study and practice focused on examining and analyzing various aspects of elections to ensure their integrity, transparency, and fairness. It involves applying scientific methods, statistical analysis, and investigative techniques to scrutinize election processes, procedures, and outcomes. The primary goals of election forensics include detecting irregularities, identifying potential fraud or manipulation, and enhancing public confidence in the electoral process.

Key aspects of election forensics

Key aspects of election forensics include:

1. Data Analysis: This involves analyzing voter turnout patterns, vote counts, demographic trends, and other relevant data to detect anomalies or suspicious patterns that may indicate irregularities.
2. Statistical Methods: Election forensics often employs statistical techniques to assess the likelihood of certain outcomes or to compare expected patterns with observed results. This can involve methods like Benford’s Law, which examines the frequency distribution of digits in numerical data to detect discrepancies.
3. Audits and Reviews: Conducting audits of election results, either manually or through automated systems, is crucial in election forensics. Audits may involve verifying paper ballots against electronic records or conducting recounts to ensure accuracy.
4. Monitoring and Observation: Election forensics may also involve monitoring polling stations, counting processes, and the overall electoral environment to identify potential vulnerabilities or procedural issues that could affect the integrity of the election.
5. Expert Testimony and Reporting: Experts in election forensics may provide testimony or reports based on their findings to inform electoral authorities, policymakers, or the public about the credibility and fairness of the election process.
6. Legal and Policy Implications: Election forensics findings can have significant legal and policy implications. They may influence electoral reforms, legal challenges, or the implementation of new safeguards to protect against fraud and manipulation.

Overall, election forensics plays a critical role in safeguarding democracy by providing evidence-based insights into electoral processes and outcomes, thereby ensuring that elections reflect the genuine will of the electorate.

Election forensics methods rely on the analysis of officially reported election results and are often conducted at the level of polling stations or ballot boxes and voting machines. Compared to observers at polling stations, election forensics analyzes tend to be more comprehensive, and also provide an assessment of possible election manipulation that includes information on the degree of statistical confidence that the conclusions of the analysis have.

Numbers manipulated by humans create patterns that are unlikely to occur if they were produced by a natural process — such as free and fair elections or normal commercial transactions. These discrepancies suggest either that the numbers were deliberately altered or that other factors – such as a range of normal strategic voting practices – influenced the election results. The greater the number of statistical tests that identify patterns that deviate from what is expected to occur naturally, the more likely the deviation is the result of fraud rather than legitimate strategic voting.

Advantages and disadvantages of election forensics

Compared to existing methods of controlling the transparency of the electoral process on the voting day itself, such as observers at polling stations and parallel tabulation of votes, electoral electoral forensics has three key advantages:

1. Election forensics relies on objective data, such as officially reported election results broken down at the level of constituencies, polling stations and/or ballot boxes, or the machine.
2. Electoral forensics enables a systematic and impartial analysis of reported votes from all polling stations and at all locations where observers are not possible for various reasons (eg. polling stations abroad or in institutions for the execution of institutional sanctions).
3. As a result of the analysis of election forensics, evaluations of possible manipulation of election results are obtained, which include statistical assessments of the degree of reliability of the conclusions.

However, election forensics also has three drawbacks:

1. Election forensics does not provide definitive proof of election fraud, but only indicates statistical anomalies in the results (possible type and places of possible manipulation). Finding evidence or explanations for anomalies can be obtained from observer reports at polling stations identified as places of possible manipulation or other social research about the country or location of interest. However, with this contribution, election forensics directs further research to a smaller number of places of possible election manipulation, which lowers the costs of such further research.
2. Election forensics requires more than basic statistical knowledge and significant computing power, because the analysis is performed with tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of data from polling stations. Fortunately, statistical packages have been developed that enable the application of all forensic methods, generating test results and creating all graphical means of analyzing election results. Statisticians can then interpret the obtained statistical results and provide them in the form of a report that is accessible and understandable to practitioners (political scientists, journalists, etc.).
3. Election forensics provides the most reliable results if the analysis is performed with detailed election results — ideally with comprehensive polling station data on voter turnout, valid ballots, and the number of votes for all parties and candidates. Forensic tools can work with less detailed, aggregated data, but the results of election forensic analysis are of limited usefulness if election results are only provided as aggregated data at the national level.