This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Electronic voting, the use of electronic systems to cast, record or count votes, could potentially simplify the process of electing new political leaders or other representatives. While some countries have already started using internet-connected devices or electronic voting machines at polling stations, the trustworthiness, security and anonymity of electronic voting systems are still widely debated.
Two distinct research teams, based at Sorbonne University and at the University of Geneva, recently carried out similar experiments assessing the potential of quantum physics-informed electronic voting protocols. The results of their tests, both published in Physical Review Letters, indicate that quantum protocols could allow votes to be collected electronically while protecting voter anonymity, without relying on a trusted central election authority. The two teams adapted and tested versions of a protocol developed by researchers at Sorbonne University and other institutes, which was introduced in a paper published in Physical Review Applied in 2022.
This protocol was designed to enable anonymous and publicly verifiable electronic voting. "Our team mainly focuses on developing and implementing protocols beyond key distribution and on quantum networks," Nicolas Laurent-Puig, first author of the first recently published paper, told Phys.org. "The idea of implementing this protocol arose directly from our team's work in this area, as well as from the recent Classical Voting event for the election in France, which was later shown to be insecure." Laurent-Puig and his colleagues at Sorbonne University first built a high-performing source that could produce GHZ (Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger) states using photons (particles of light).
GHZ states are multipartite entangled states that connect three or more qubits. These states were necessary for demonstrating the quantum voting protocol. "We implemented the protocol in a private, secure manner and also developed the protocol to make it more scalable and resource-efficient," explained Laurent-Puig.
"We were able to run an election with 16 candidates and two pools of four voters, running our test through a multipartite entangled photon source." The second study, by a research team at the University of Geneva, used very similar methods to produce GHZ states and realize the voting protocol experimentally. They tested the protocol in a simulated election with four voters and two candidates. "The original version of the protocol that we implemented was published as a theory paper in 2022, but had not yet been demonstrated experimentally," Joey Marcellino, the Ph.D. student in Rob Thew's research group who worked on the experiment, told Phys.org.
"We had just finished another experiment concerning distributed polarization entanglement and realized we could 'easily' adapt our setup to produce the entangled states required for the voting protocol." Marcellino and his colleagues set out to modify the protocol introduced in 2022 to make it easier to implement in an experimental setting. They then ran a proof-of-principle demonstration of the updated protocol. Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. d research that matter—daily or weekly.
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