I came across an article from Wired [1] explaining that an open source web app for voter registration in the US had been developed and released in the US. Seems like something that should have happened years ago. In any event, it's a Ruby on Rails app that demands 1.9.2 of Ruby [2]. This looked to me like a great opportunity to learn something new and take 12.0 and Debian for another spin.

When I tried last night, I was immediately frustrated. But coming at it today brought some success; it's not a patch yet, but I will follow this post with build notes. If it becomes a patch, it'll need to be quick work. As the demo [3] suggests, it makes quick work out of the voter registration process.

[1] Wired Article: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/dems-release-voter-registration...

[2] web app page: http://democrats.github.com/voter-registration/

[3] Demo: http://voter-registration.herokuapp.com/

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Starting from TKL Core 12.0, here're my build notes:

[set hostname (/etc/hosts, /etc/hostname)]

apt-get update
apt-get install build-essential bison openssl \
     libreadline6 libreadline6-dev curl git-core \
     zlib1g zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-0 \
     libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt-dev \
     autoconf libc6-dev ncurses-dev libpq-dev
curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --rails
gem install bundler
git clone git://github.com/democrats/voter-registration.git
cd voter-registration
bundle install
rake db:migrage
rake db:seed

It can take a while to compile, I guess I could warn. This is a potential project for students on Raspis running wheezy, so I'm perseverating about compile time with 256m of ram. Feedback is appreciated - but this may be moot before anyone has time or interest in commenting.

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