In considering the merits of various existing and proposed election systems, I've found the following two concepts highly useful:

1. Community of Trust: For a specified election system, who are the people I have to trust? Where machines are concerned, who are the people behind the machines that must be trusted? Are there any ways of reliably verifying these people do what they're trusted to do and don't do what they're trusted not to do? What, exactly, am I trusting these people to do or not do? We should seek to eliminate unverifiable trust in individuals who could potentially be the corruptible "weak link" in the chain to ballot processing. In some cases, our trust is divided among a larger group such that all members of the group would have to collude in order to manipulate election results. In these cases, we should seek to maximize the size of the community because the more people who would have to collude to manipulate results, the less likely manipulation is to occur. Similarly, where trust is given to a group, it is wise to have representatives from multiple competing interests within the group to act as checks and balances on each others' participation.

2. WWKD: "What Would K. Do?" (Where K is a corrupt high-level elections official or Secretary of State). This is similar to game theory. To expose any flaws in an election system, I pretend that I'm a powerful and corrupt election official with access to equipment and records and hiring/firing authority over my subordinates and, further, that I want to manipulate an election to favor a specific candidate in a race conducted using a specific election system without getting caught, or at least without leaving any evidence of said manipulation. I advocate that proponents of new elections systems conduct "war games" such as this to expose possible methods of election fraud. In some scenarios, the actors in the game could be vendors, first line elections workers or IT professionals within the elections agency.