Quantum protocol for electronic voting without election authorities

TL;DR

This paper introduces a quantum voting protocol that leverages multipartite entanglement to enable secure, verifiable elections without trusted authorities or computational assumptions, enhancing security and transparency.

Contribution

It presents a novel quantum protocol for electronic voting that removes the need for election authorities and relies on entanglement fidelity for security.

Findings

Protocol is secure based on entanglement fidelity

Can be implemented with current photonic technology for small groups

Achieves publicly verifiable election results

Abstract

Electronic voting is a very useful but challenging internet-based protocol that despite many theoretical approaches and various implementations with different degrees of success, remains a contentious topic due to issues in reliability and security. Here we present a quantum protocol that exploits an untrusted source of multipartite entanglement to carry out an election without relying on election authorities, simultaneous broadcasting or computational assumptions, and whose result is publicly verifiable. The level of security depends directly on the fidelity of the shared multipartite entangled quantum state, and the protocol can be readily implemented for a few voters with state-of-the-art photonic technology.