France’s largest e-vote exposed vulnerabilities, quantum offers fix

France’s June 2022 legislative elections, which collected over 524,000 electronic ballots from overseas residents, represent the largest e-voting deployment to date in terms of ballots cast, and subsequent reverse engineering by French researchers uncovered critical vulnerabilities in the system. The platform, used to elect 11 deputies and involving 1.6 million eligible voters, lacked the robust security needed for reliable remote elections. Researchers uncovered these flaws after the vote, prompting a search for more secure alternatives; post-quantum cryptography and quantum electronic voting are now being explored. The work demonstrates a quantum e-voting protocol operating under realistic conditions, taking a step toward quantum-secure democratic election procedures. The platform, designed to facilitate voting for French residents abroad, underwent a reverse engineering analysis…