Retarus facilitates secure voting in digital elections
POLYAS, a market leader in online voting, opts for Retarus Transactional Email
Secaucus, March 24, 2025 //
POLYAS, a market leader in online elections, now sends out electronic ballot documents using Retarus’ Transactional Email. The Munich-based enterprise cloud service provider ensures that the authentication via email for digital voting meets the strict security requirements of the German electoral law, the federal office for information security (BSI), as well as complying with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). POLYAS additionally uses a solution for generating passwords securely, which was developed in concert with the experts at Retarus.
The free, secret casting of ballots is essential for a functioning democracy. The push for digitalization, especially exacerbated by the Covid pandemic, has resulted in the increasing number of elections and votes being carried out online. In this context, POLYAS enables millions of voters annually to digitally vote, thereby simplifying democratic processes. Several of Germany’s major political parties, for instance the CDU at their digital party conference in 2021, as well as numerous other regional governments, universities, and companies use the service for secret ballot casting. To ensure they fulfill the highest security standards for online voting, the company uses Retarus Transactional Email to send login details to eligible voters. The cloud-based service guarantees reliable, quick inbox placement, even with huge email volumes of up to 10 million emails per hour. Just like POLYAS‘s voting software, the Retarus service meets the latest BSI and GDPR criteria. Retarus is also committed to maximum data protection and therefore processes all data locally in their self-operated, certified, audit-ready data centers in Germany. Beyond this, the services offered by the Munich-based company fulfill all common industry-specific standards and compliance requirements. For this reason, Retarus Transactional Email is the ideal technology for POLYAS to conduct free, secret, legally-compliant online ballots.
Tailored solution for generating passwords
During implementation, the developers at Retarus worked closely with POLYAS to gear the service precisely to their needs. Each of the eligible voters can only participate in the election by entering an automatically generated password. To meet this need, Retarus integrated a special solution developed in close cooperation with POLYAS to cover the entire authentication process. Registered voters receive individually generated passwords, while POLYAS – for security purposes – only receives the hash values for the passwords. In this way, POLYAS ensures secure authentication, guarantees a secret ballot, and prevents duplicate voting. With the current ongoing development, the company now entrusts critical process tasks to its independent partner Retarus, creating a principled separation of duty for online elections.
Should it become necessary to resend the login details, for instance if a voter has forgotten their password, support staff can effortlessly trigger the resending of the details directly and securely by way of the browser – once again without being able to view the highly sensitive access details.
Secure elections ensured by integrating Retarus’ services
“We are simplifying digital voting participation and involvement as well as bringing it to life online. Participation should be easy and secure for everyone. We would like to stimulate election enthusiasm by providing the best technology that keeps voting both free and secret for all. That’s why we are very pleased that with Retarus’ services we can offer our voting processes securely, reliably, and perfectly compliant with data protection regulations” explains Jan Wegner, Head of Product at POLYAS. “The customer-oriented approach of Retarus’ experts, who developed an integrated solution for our specific requirements, was especially impressive. By way of Retarus Transactional Email, the passwords are transferred securely, guaranteeing the basic precondition for secret, legally compliant voting.”
Martin Hager, founder and CEO at Retarus, adds: “Supporting democratic processes with our technology is one of the most important fields of application for messaging. We are pleased that POLYAS shares our confidence that our services are ideally suited to the requirements. Especially with such a sensitive topic, this is a huge compliment for us.”