Self-tallying quantum anonymous voting

Abstract

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 or 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 simple calculation. Unlike all previous quantum works on anonymous voting, our quantum anonymous protocol firstly possesses the properties of privacy, self-tallying, non-reusability, verifiability and fairness at the same time. Besides, we demonstrate that the entanglement of the novel quantum states used in our protocol makes the attack from outside eavesdropper and inside dishonest voters impossible. We also generalize our protocol to execute tasks of anonymous multi-party computation, such as anonymous broadcast and anonymous ranking.