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Experimental demonstration of a two-voter quantum anonymous voting prototype with continuous variables

Piao Tan, Peng Huang, Qijun Zhang, Mingxuan Guo, Xiaojuan Liao, Hanwen Yin, Kuntuo Zhu, Tao Wang, Guihua Zeng

Published Jun 6, 2026• 0 citations

Abstract

Classical electronic voting is increasingly being adopted for Internet-based elections, requiring system designs that ensure fairness, legitimacy, verifiability, and voter anonymity-thereby preserving ballot confidentiality, uniqueness, and integrity. Quantum voting can provide information-theoretic security against repudiation and forgery in such systems. However, compared to classical voting protocols, current quantum voting protocols often suffer from limited efficiency, high cost, and implementation complexity. Here, we introduce a streamlined and efficient quantum voting architecture that simplifies the process by eliminating the privacy amplification step in the voting phase while incorporating authority-assisted anonymity, while maintaining full voter authentication, voting, and tallying capabilities. In an experimental demonstration of a quantum voting network, two voters achieved authentication rates of 336 and 406 times per second over 50 km of single-mode fiber, and signed voting files of 25.02 kbit and 56.29 kbit at a quantum signing rate of 966 times per second, resulting in total voting rates of 244 and 279 times per second, respectively. This work represents the first experimental implementation of a continuous-variable (CV)-based quantum anonymous voting prototype. The architecture is designed to be compatible with existing coherent optical communication networks and provides a practical quantum-enhanced building block toward future voting systems.

DOI: 10.1038/s41534-026-01291-2

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Ensuring security and integrity of elections constitutes an important challenge with wide-ranging societal implications. Classically, security guarantees can be ensured based on computational complexity, which may be challenged by quantum computers. We show that the use of quantum networks can enable information-theoretic security for the desirable aspects of a distributed voting scheme in a resource-efficient manner. In our approach, ballot information is encoded in quantum states that enable an exponential reduction in communication complexity compared to classical communication. In addition, we provide an efficient and secure anonymous queuing protocol based on a distributed secure sum. As a result, our scheme only requires modest quantum memories with size scaling logarithmically with the number of voters. This intrinsic efficiency together with certain noise-robustness of our protocol paves the way for its physical implementation in realistic quantum networks.

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,

nm

n

-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.

A series of quantum voting protocols of continuous variables is proposed. Three methods are employed to ensure that the quantum voting obeys some desirable rules. Entanglement is used to keep voters away from the voting results. We enable voters to operate identically to represent the same vote to prevent the tallyman from gaining information about individual voters. We also propose an effective scheme to prevent voters from voting more than once. In both two-valued and multivalued ballot protocols, several specific constraints are set to meet the rules.