Casualty figure verification is the practice of cross-referencing reported death and injury counts against multiple independent sources to establish a defensible evidential range. Official figures from parties to a conflict or from political actors carry inherent reliability constraints rooted in institutional interest. The method draws on hospital admissions data, morgue records, burial site analysis, demographic modelling, and passive media surveillance simultaneously, because no single source captures total mortality. A single-source figure is not sufficient for publication.
The technique applies when assessing the reliability of government or armed group casualty releases, corroborating or challenging a reported death toll, documenting civilian harm using open-source and medical data, estimating excess mortality during a public health emergency, and identifying systematic undercounting or overcounting in official records. Each figure, in isolation, is ambiguous. The range, corroborated across independent methodologies, is not.
MED-001 sets out the methodology for collecting, grading, triangulating, and ranging casualty figures to evidentiary standard.
Eight workflow steps, six tooling sources, five false-positive checks, five chain-of-custody requirements.
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01
Required Tools
Six platforms covering conflict fatalities, demographic baselines, and peer review.
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02
OPSEC
Source grading, dataset scope discipline, and multi-methodology verification requirements.
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03
Workflow
Eight-step sequence from event parameters to evidential range statement.
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04
False Positives
Exclusion categories, double-counting, confidence intervals, and baseline invalidation.
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05
Chain of Custody
Five requirements covering source recording, hashing, grading, calculation logging, and archiving.
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06
Key Queries
Seven operator patterns across ACLED, WHO, HDX, Google, and PubMed.
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