Cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab has announced a blockchain-based online voting solution.

A team of developers at Kaspersky Lab Business Incubator worked on an experimental project called Polys. They developed a commercial solution that allows anyone to conduct secure, anonymous and scalable online voting, while ensuring that results cannot be altered by participants or organizers.

Polys is based on smart contracts in Ethereum allowing ballot verification and vote tallies to be performed in a decentralized manner. Moreover, blockchain’s decentralized nature enables network participants to verify the accuracy of voting execution.

“…when exploring the possible implementations of blockchain in particular, our team realized that this technology combined with the company’s cybersecurity expertise could solve key problems related to the privacy, transparency and security of online voting. We’re excited that we have been able to create a suitable environment for this internal innovation,” Vartan Minasyan, Head of Investment and Innovation at Kaspersky Lab, said.

The Polys voting system is unique in the sense that blockchain is encrypted and backed up with mathematical algorithms. Kaspersky explained that this helps in ensuring anonymity, hiding intermediate results and performing calculations on the encrypted data – something that cannot be done in other blockchain systems.

The solution has been designed to support voting at all levels and for any number of participants. Polys is highly customizable and can be made fully scalable with capacity for thousands of voters in international corporations, political parties, universities, global communities, NGOs, etc. It could also be tailored to specific requirements in terms of authorization, the interface design, and integration with other services.