Kaspersky: success of blockchain voting during the pandemic

Due to precautions to contain the spread of coronavirus, many schools and universities have been closed. Although the situation is improving, the fact remains that in some countries, as indicated by Unesco statistics, over 1.2 billion students will still not be able to return to school or university.

To cope with this criticality has been enabled for distance learning but not only. From the analysis conducted on the use of Polys, a blockchain-based online voting platform which left the Kaspersky Innovation Hub, it emerged that all those decision-making processes relating to education were also transferred digitally.

March and April the number of sessions on Polys has tripled compared to 2019, recording significant growth especially as regards school organizations. Votes dedicated to this area increased by 17 percentage points when compared to 35% in the same period of 2019.

E-voting has been widely used by both students and teachers, academics and others institutions. For example, to choose the speakers for the research work, approve the study programs and make organizational decisions. The students, through the Polys platform, expressed their opinion on the effectiveness of remote teaching, on the quality of online lessons and, for example, chose the winner of a drawing contest.

Also the elections of the Student organizations took place regularly, such as those of Aktief Slip, an association for environmental science students from Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, in which over 460 students voted for board members.

The participants of the International Institute of Debate, a non-profit organization founded in Tunisia, they have chosen the VP of Learning & Development through Polys, while the parliament of the students of the school Rokiskis Juozas Tumas-Vaizgantas in Lithuania, used Polys for the election of the president of the student council.

"The elections in Tunisia were due to take place during the lockdown. For this reason, we decided to resort to e-voting . The candidates participated in a question and answer session and, subsequently, students have expressed their vote using Polys directly from their own devices."

"Polys not only offers the possibility to rate but provides users access to reports and statistics on the vote. Thanks to this system we could save three days of organizational work and, above all, we have exposed students to the risk of contagion," said Elyes Guermazi, Founder and Director of the International Institute of Debate .

users of the Polys have found that the platform allowed them to vote for the safe , transparent and anonymous, at the same time reducing the planning time and the counting of votes.

"We had to see how the online voting was already very widespread in the field of education. Our main users were mostly students, but now even the school staff organizes and actively participates in these votes. We are pleased to see that, despite all the difficulties, the students and teachers are trying to continue with usual activities. We are also proud that many of them will understand the benefits of our platform and consider the possibility of using online voting in the future, when everything will return to normal," said Alexander Sazonov, Head of Product of Polys .