There's always a risk that someone will peek at your ballot during an election. Physicists have come up with a solution: anonymous voting safeguarded not by people, but by the laws of nature.
Their 'magic ballot box' operates with light particles — photons. Four participants each act on their photons, as if tossing colored balls linked by an invisible thread — quantum entanglement. This hides their choice: anyone who tries to read one ball breaks the link and destroys the secret. Four such entangled particles form a GHZ state (named after its creators: Greenberger, Horne, and future Nobel laureate Anton Zeilinger). The outcome is read out via photometry, and the box yields only the sum of votes. Secrecy relies on the speed of light and quantum entropy — a measure of chaos that makes the result unpredictable.
The experiment succeeded in 87% of cases — for now, it's a tabletop prototype. But here's the twist: the system is fundamentally unhackable. Copying an unknown quantum state is forbidden by nature; this isn't a cracked code, it's deeper.
The GHZ state was conceived in 1989 by Daniel Greenberger, Michael Horne, and Anton Zeilinger. The name comes from the first letters of their surnames.
The theme of secret elections with quantum protection appears in cyberpunk: in Stephenson's 'Snow Crash,' characters vote using crypto keys, but only quantum mechanics promises absolute secrecy.