Anonymous voting is a voting method of hiding the link between a vote and a voter, the context of which ranges from governmental elections to decision making in small groups like councils and companies. In this paper, we propose a quantum anonymous voting protocol assisted by two kinds of entangled quantum states. Particularly, we provide a mechanism of opening and permuting the ordered votes of all the voters in an anonymous manner; any party who is interested in the voting results can acquire a permutation copy and then obtains the voting result through a simple calculation. Unlike all previous quantum works on anonymous voting, our quantum anonymous protocol possesses the properties of privacy, self-tallying, nonreusability, verifiability, and fairness at the same time. In addition, we demonstrate that the entanglement of the quantum states used in our protocol makes an attack from an outside eavesdropper and inside dishonest voters impossible. We also generalize our protocol to execute the task of anonymous multiparty computation, such as anonymous broadcast and anonymous ranking.
Anonymous voting is a voting method of hiding the link between a vote and a voter, the context of which ranges from governmental elections to decision making in small groups like councils and companies. In this paper, we propose a quantum anonymous voting protocol assisted by two kinds of entangled quantum states. Particularly, we provide a mechanism of opening and permuting the ordered votes of all the voters in an anonymous manner; any party who is interested in the voting results can acquire a permutation copy and then obtains the voting result through a simple calculation. Unlike all previous quantum works on anonymous voting, our quantum anonymous protocol possesses the properties of privacy, self-tallying, nonreusability, verifiability, and fairness at the same time. In addition, we demonstrate that the entanglement of the quantum states used in our protocol makes an attack from an outside eavesdropper and inside dishonest voters impossible. We also generalize our protocol to execute the task of anonymous multiparty computation, such as anonymous broadcast and anonymous ranking.
Self-tallying quantum anonymous voting (SQAV) has drawn considerable attention since it was proposed. However, constrained by design challenges, all existing protocols only accommodate single-selection voting and cannot support multi-selection voting. In this paper, we propose a SQAV protocol with multi-selection voting functionality. In our protocol, nmn-particle entangled states are equally divided into n groups, and the n particles in each entangled state are delivered to n voters, one particle per voter. Each voter obtains n voting vectors by sequentially measuring all his (or her) particles that belong to n different group, and then encodes his or her voting information into the vector corresponding to the secret index. Due to entanglement correlation, each voter can verify whether his or her ballot is correct through computation, while any participant can obtain the vote count for each candidate through computation. Our protocol satisfies self-tallying, nonreusability, verifiability, and fairness.
Anonymous voting enables no one to link a vote and a voter and it has been widely used in contexts such as governmental elections and decision making in groups. In this paper we propose a resource-efficient self-tallying quantum anonymous voting (SQAV) protocol with two-particle entangled states. Similar to the first SQAV protocol with multipartite entangled states [Phys. Rev. A 94, 022333 (2016)], it possesses the properties of privacy, nonreusability, verifiability, fairness, binding, and self-tallying at the same time. We analyze its performance in a noisy quantum network. Our protocol requires mn[1+log2(n+1)] qubits to prepare the information states, and its quantum resource cost is lower than that of the first SQAV protocol, where n2log2m+nlog2n qubits are required to prepare the information states. We also prove the optimality of our quantum resource cost. To be more practical, it is further generalized to the case with three kinds of votes including positive votes, negative votes, and abstaining from voting. Our generalized protocol requires n(2m+1)[1+log2(n+1)] qubits to prepare the information states, which also has lower quantum resource cost than that of the improved SQAV protocol [IEEE Trans. Inf. Forens. Secur. 17, 3264 (2022)], where n2log2(2m+1)+nlog2n qubits are required to prepare the information states. In contrast to multipartite entangled states, two-particle entangled states are relatively easy to prepare, which makes the proposed protocol feasible using current technology.
Abstract As a special voting method, one‐vote veto voting also has a wide range of applications. A veto means that when the voting council puts forward a proposal, it cannot pass unless all the voters agree to it. If there is a no vote, the proposal will be rejected, but no one will know how anyone else votes. In most existing quantum anonymous one‐vote veto voting protocols, an absolutely honest third party is generally required to assist the voting. However, it is difficult to find a fully trusted third party in reality. In addition, the existing quantum anonymous one‐vote veto protocol does not consider the attack from the insider voters. Therefore, based on the characteristics of entanglement swapping between the Cat state and Bell state, the authors propose a new quantum anonymous one‐vote veto protocol, which can not only calculate the voting result quickly and effectively but also demonstrate higher security.
Abstract Anonymous voting is often one decision-making choice in many democracies. Facing the security threats from quantum computers, classical anonymous voting protocols based on computational complexity hypothesis have innovated to quantum anonymous voting protocols based on quantum mechanics. In this paper, we propose a quantum anonymous voting protocol by using high-dimension single particles. With the help of EA and T , the construction of our protocol makes each legitimate voter cast only one ballot, and all ballots open in a quite random rearrangement. Each voter can anonymously trace his/her vote by a private position index, thus our protocol achieving the precious properties of eligibility, privacy, no-reusability, verifiability and fairness. We also analyze that the protocol can successfully resist attacks from external eavesdroppers and internal participants, ensuring that our voting protocol is secure under ideal conditions. Designing mature quantum anonymous voting protocols is challenging.
We introduce a quantum voting protocol that uses superposition and entanglement to enable anonymous voting with trusted voting machines, in a centralized setting with a single machine and in a distributed setting where several machines are linked to a voting center through quantum channels. A voter selects a candidate through a restricted ballot interface; the machine encodes the vote as a phase-flip operation, controlled by the voter's identity register, on an entangled candidate state. Tallying is performed by interference with a reference branch followed by a measurement of the candidate register, which reproduces the vote distribution without iterative classical counting. Because every tallying run consumes the quantum state, the machines store the cast choices classically and replay the voting stage for each run. The protocol uses only basic quantum gates (Hadamard and controlled-Z). We provide analytical examples (4 voters with 2 candidates and 8 voters with 3 candidates) and numerical experiments that simulate ideal conditions, depolarizing, memory, readout, and gate noise, faulty or mistaken ballots, larger instances with confidence intervals, and sampling convergence. The simulations reproduce the theoretical tally probabilities in the ideal case and show how the tally is distorted by noise and by faulty ballots; no error correction or mitigation is applied. Voter anonymity is formalized as the indistinguishability of tallying transcripts under vote permutations, and an identity-dephasing step renders the identity register exactly maximally mixed under the stated trust assumptions. The numbers of protocol runs needed for exact tallying and for winner identification are analyzed explicitly.
Voting is one of the most prominent components of democracy. The one-vote veto, which requires the voting result to be only “yes” or “no”, is a particularly noteworthy type of voting with widespread application. When obtaining a “no” result, no useful information about the number of “no” votes and who votes “no” is disclosed. In this paper, we introduce a protocol for anonymous one-vote veto utilizing qubits and local Pauli operations Z and X, building simple processes for easy implementation under the current technology. For better elaboration, we give two examples: all voters cast “yes” votes and only one voter casts a "no." Then, the corresponding experiment tests are conducted on the simulated IBM quantum computer to verify their feasibility.We also show that the proposed protocol has the desirable properties of privacy, fairness, verifiability and robustness. Furthermore, we analyze the proposed protocol’s security against cheating from eavesdroppers, a semi-honest server and malicious voters. This work is the first attempt to illustrate how qubits can be useful for building a secure anonymous one-vote veto strategy.