Educational entities and NGOs continued to dominate voting sessions as Polys, a blockchain-based voting platform from the Kaspersky Innovation Hub, saw three times more voting sessions conducted in the three months from December 2020 to February 2021 as compared to the same period the previous year.
The surge was revealed following analysis of anonymised metadata from the platform.
The lockdown measures that were implemented in nearly 100 countries by March 2020, moved many aspects of people’s daily routines online, including work, shopping and social interactions. The research into anonymised sessions from, Polys highlights that people also started to make more joint decisions via this online access.
To see how the pandemic had affected the extent of remote voting, researchers examined statistics from three months prior to the time when global measures were enacted, starting from December 2019, when many organisations discussed their end-of-year results. These were then compared with results from December 2020-February 2021.
The most active segment for online voting was education – accounting for 60% of all sessions carried out by organisations. That figure, a year ago, was 43%. Non Governmental Organisations, who conducted 17% of sessions, was two percentage points more than the same period a year ago.
The share for governmental organisations and parties also grew from 6% to 10%, making it the third most active vertical, replacing votes on business matters.
This is not the only change seen. As gatherings in large groups were generally avoided, less than 1% of voting was held at public events. Comparatively, almost 7% of sessions fell into this category. Experts also noticed that joint decisions on local initiatives, which had earlier dropped from 3% to 1%, returned to 3% in the current timeframe as discussions around local initiatives returned.
Alexander Sazonov, Head of Product, Polys, commented: “We have seen interest and trust in voting via blockchain rising. Over the past year, people didn’t only return to our platform, but also advised their friends and colleagues to test it too. For example, we saw that after online voting in education, local business also voted on our platform.
“With self-isolation measures, secure online voting has become almost the only way to continue collaborative activities, which has accelerated its adoption.”
