DNC just open-sourced their voter registration platform

This application is very, very simple; it's a practically the starting skeleton of a modern Rails/Devise application.<p>One useful reason to bookmark it: it's a pretty good how-to for "any web application whose purpose is to spit out PDF files that need to follow a specific format". There are a LOT of business processes that work like that.

The first part of the software license looks to be BSD/MIT-like with the <i>to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software,...</i> sentence, but then there's this paragraph:<p><i>This permission does not include: (a) any use of the Software other than for its intended purpose; or (b) any use of the Software in any manner that violates applicable law. Any use of the Software other than as specifically authorized herein is strictly prohibited and will terminate the license granted herein.</i>

I like how the registration form shows the form validation errors inline: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/U5QL1.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/U5QL1.png</a><p>Looking at the source view(<a href="https://github.com/democrats/voter-registration/blob/master/app/views/register/_form.html.erb" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/democrats/voter-registration/blob/master/...</a>) it doesn't seems there is some extra markup, unless I am missing something.<p>So, How can I implement the same in my rails app?

Wouldn't a better strategy be a Twilio app that calls voters and informs them that they are registered to vote already?

I worked as a Rails dev at the DNC in 2010-2011. I pushed for open-sourcing our fully-featured voter reg. Rails app back then, but didn't find much support for the idea. The political world is pretty wary of "giving code away" because the opposition will use it, etc. So, progress?<p>We were allowed to open-source some infrastructure code back then: <a href="https://github.com/dnclabs" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dnclabs</a><p>Hopefully they'll continue working on this tool and make it something worth using and contributing to. I've tried to convince several political orgs. I worked for in the past to do this, but so far none have bitten.

Maybe it's just my screen, but I find that shade of grey to be incredibly difficult to read.<p>I do like the trend towards technological openness though, hopefully we'll be seeing more of this sort of thing.

This will be helpful for the DNC to register the dead people and dogs needed to win elections this year with national unemployment at 8.3%.