Lecture “Online Voting and POLYAS”

Moritz Strube, Chief Technical Officer of POLYAS GmbH, has been invited by Prof. Dr. Ralf Küsters, Professor for Information Security and Cryptography at the University of Trier to analyse the current state of online elections and present the online voting service POLYAS. The lecture was given on December 8th at the University of Trier.

After a period of disenchantment internet voting is again becoming an important and exciting topic. Current indicators for this are, for example, the high VC funding of a global market leader, or Switzerland’s plans to offer internet voting for national parliamentary elections. Online elections are faced with challenges regarding secrecy and security but recent research shows promising ways to enable secret and verifiable internet elections.

POLYAS is an online voting system successfully responsible for a series of elections in Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Finland since 1996. So far,POLYAS has processed 2.2 million votes via the internet. The system was the subject of several scientific testings.

In the future, work will be done on the expansion of the existing POLYAS online voting system to include further election protocols in order to being able to fulfill more complex requirements of elections. POLYAS will meet future requirements even more efficiently, quickly and safely, especially those of complex elections in Germany and abroad. The planned activities will be guided by the principles of transparency and cooperation in distributed systems to promote confidence in Internet elections.