About POLYAS: market leader in secure online voting
- ️Mon Jun 24 2024
The people behind online voting
Millions of voters use the POLYAS online voting system to cast their votes every year. Around 50 POLYAS employees at three locations in Germany and Switzerland are dedicated to enabling online participation and simplifying democratic processes.
Our Development team in Kassel is continuously improving and developing POLYAS online voting software. This is also where the Administration and Accounting teams are located and where they manage all the processes within the company.
Our Sales, Election Management and Marketing teams are based in Kassel, Berlin and St. Gallen (Switzerland). Dealing with topics such as “Election regulations”, “Secure authentication” or “Vote counting” are all part of a day’s work for our election experts who directly support our clients in setting up their online elections and happily answer any questions that may arise.
High standards of data protection for your online election
Protection of our clients’ personal data is particularly important to us. Data protection goals such as confidentiality, integrity and data minimization are of our highest priority. For example, it’s not necessary to process voters’ personal data when voting online with POLYAS.
POLYAS history: more than 25 years of experience
The first POLYAS online election took place in Finland in the summer of 1996 with 30,000 voters in three languages. Following this success, POLYAS system was further developed by Micromata software company (known, for example, for the DHL tracking portal and online franking). Corporate spin-off took place in 2012 and POLYAS GmbH was created. In 2014 the young team managed to organize the first online election in a self-service format.
2016: POLYAS CORE 2.5.0 certification
In March 2016, our online voting software in CORE 2.2.3. version became a central component of certification by the Federal Office for Information Security (The BSI) according to international Common Criteria standards. The certificate guarantees that the secrecy of a POLYAS online election is maintained and that everyone can cast their vote only once. Find out more about the certificate >
2019: Platform for online elections
Services of POLYAS GmbH will now be combined in the POLYAS online voting manager to enable intelligent interfaces between the nomination platform, online voting and live voting, thus increasing the efficiency for the election administration.
2022: New management board
In addition to Kai Reinhard, Jan Wegner is now also part of the management.
Applied mathematics and online voting
Our namesake is the Hungarian mathematician George Pólya (1887-1985) who taught for years at University of Stanford. Amongst other works, he wrote a series of works called “How to Solve It” which is still considered core literature in approaches to problem solving. In addition, his groundwork highly contributed to encryption technology and calculation of proportional representation elections.
Democracy in the 21st century
Our mission is to stimulate participation in elections by developing the best technologies for fair and secure online elections. To reach these goals, we invest in our research. A wonderful example of it is our collaboration with TU Darmstadt in a project called “FlexiVote”, funded by the State of Hesse.