Polyas, a German software provider for online elections, expands in five new countries. Since the beginning of this week, Polyas also offeres its online electoral system to customers in Austria, France, Italy, Great Britain and Switzerland. The Berlin- and Kassel-based company has the goal to digitalise democracy worldwide.
With more than 100 conducted elections, Polyas edges continuously into the market of digital elections and looks confident into the future: “The year 2016 is a milestone for us. Until the end of December we will be active in six countries and will have served more than 3 million eligible voters with our electoral software. For that reason we intensively focus on perpetually developing our products and our services”, says co-founder and CEO Ralf Mueller.
The first few days after the international launch already led to some reasonable success: With 20.000 eligible voters in the English speaking regions and four new electoral projects, Polyas experiences a solid start in the international market.
With the international expansion, the online elections provider Polyas expects an increase of 10 million voters in this business year. In all of the five countries which Polyas just entered decisions makers already started to discuss the possible implementation of online voting on a national level. Mueller thus says: “As we have developed the leading technological software, it is perfectly obvious that we are internationally present with our tool.” Online elections don’t have national borders. This is not a national movement, but an international development. Therefore we are now active in six countries.”
For many years programmers worked on the IT solution for secure elections. Polyas now offers international customers an online election that ensures the secrecy of the ballot. The digital election is timesaving and cost reducing. The electoral roll can be uploaded, the ballot paper can be created online and the voters receive their login data via mail. In the future, the online election saves the costs of printing. This means: No postage and always correctly formatted ballot papers. Voters log themselves on to the electoral system and cast their vote online. The Polyas electoral system ensures a legally valid and secret voting
In the age of digitalization Polyas wants to stem the exploding costs of elections and increase the voter turnout with online elections.
The online electoral system Polyas was founded by Kai Reinhard in the year 1996, so it’s not really a startup anymore. Already in the summer 1996 the founders conducted the first online election in Finland with 30.000 eligible voters and three languages. The success of the first secure online elections led to the advanced development of the Polyas system within the software company Micromata in Kassel, Germany. With the launch of election platform as web service in 2015, the founders’ team was extended with CEO Ralf Mueller and CTO Moritz Strube. Polyas then also opened a Sales & Marketing division in Berlin. Since then, 20 employees work for Polyas at three locations in Germany and Switzerland.
