Are Quantum Voting Protocols Practical?

TL;DR

This paper reviews the practicality of quantum voting protocols, analyzing their security, implementation challenges, and potential for real-world small-scale elections based on quantum mechanics principles.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of quantum voting protocols, assessing their security features, implementation issues, and near-term deployment feasibility.

Findings

Quantum protocols offer ballot secrecy and verifiability based on physics.

Implementation challenges include noise, loss, and device imperfections.

Small-scale quantum voting may be feasible in the near term.

Abstract

Quantum voting protocols aim to offer ballot secrecy and publicly verifiable tallies using physical guarantees from quantum mechanics, rather than relying solely on computational hardness. This article surveys whether such quantum voting protocols are practical. We begin by outlining core mathematical ideas such as the superposition principle, the no-cloning theorem, and quantum entanglement. We then define a common system and threat model, identifying key actors, trust assumptions, and security goals. Representative protocol families are reviewed, including entanglement-based schemes with central tallying, self-tallying designs that enable public verification, and authority-minimized approaches that certify untrusted devices through observable correlations. Finally, we evaluate implementation challenges, including loss, noise, device imperfections, scalability, and coercion resistance, and discuss realistic near-term deployment scenarios for small-scale elections.