VoteBot-Forms

Motivation

Online voter registration should be easy. Unfortunately, each state has their own form design. This application provides a nice API that abstracts across them, and falls back to the National Mail Voter Registration Form PDF when online registration is not possible.

Usage

POST to your desired form endpoint ('/pdf' or '/ovr') with json like

{ 
  callback_url: '/callback',
  user: {
    "first_name":"John",
    "middle_name":"Q",
    "last_name":"Public",
    "date_of_birth":"1950-12-25",
    "address":"314 Test St",
    "address_unit": "#1"
    "city":"Schenectady",
    "state":"NY",
    "zip":"12345",
    "phone":"123-456-7890",
    "email":"text@example.com"
    "state_id_number":"NONE",
    "ssn_last4": 0000,
    "political_party":"No Party",
    "us_citizen":true,
    "legal_resident": true,
    "disenfranchised":false,
    "has_previous_name": false,
    "has_previous_address": false
  }
}

receive a response like

{
    "status": "queued"
}

get a POST to your callback_url like

{
    "status": "success", // for print and mail
    "pdf_url": "https://hellovote.s3.amazonaws.com/forms/UUID/hellovote-registration-print-me.pdf"
}

or

{
    "status": "success", // for state OVR
    "missing_fields": []
}

Status

Currently works in:

• Alaska
• Arizona
• Colorado
• Georgia
• Hawaii
• Illinois
• Kentucky
• Massachusetts
• Vermont
• Virginia
• West Virginia

Has worked in:

• California (blocked by #1)

Could work in:

• Pennsylvania (code written in feature/pennsyvanlia-api, deployment was delayed in 2016 due to testing timeline)

PDF Form

The PDF form is generated from the National Mail Voter Registration Form, with a custom instructions and mailing page. These are combined with PDFTK and filled in with an FDF data stream before being uploaded to Amazon S3 for user download.

If the registration POST data has a flag include_postage set to true, we will generate an stamp a pre-paid USPS mailing label to from the user's home address to their local election official with EasyPost. This costs us real money, so don't enable the flag unless we've confirmed that the user does not have access to a printer and stamp at home.

If the registration POST data has a flag mail_letter set to true, we will print and mail the generated form to the user with Lob.com. This costs us real money, so don't enable the flag unless we've confirmed that the user does not have access to a printer and stamp at home.

The include_postage and mail_letter flags are not mutually exclusive, you must enable both to mail a letter with an included postage label.

Development

• virtualenv .venv; source .venv/bin/activate
• pip install -r requirements/development.txt
• python manager.py runserver
• in another terminal python manager.py rq worker

Adding new states

Votebot-forms can only work with states that have online voter registration systems (OVR) without access control (user login, captcha, etc). Because we are submitting on behalf of the user, we will not do any work to circumvent access controls.

To create a new state integration:

• add a new file called STATE.py to app/ovr_forms
• create a class that inherits from BaseOVRForm
• add required fields, making sure to match the field taxonomy. If you need to define a new field, you'll also need to add it to votebot-api, to make sure we are asking users with the correct phrasing.
• start the state submission process in a browser, and get as far as you can without a local ID
• finish the form with a volunteer's ID, after getting one from the FFTF volunteer coordinator
• add unit tests to tests/ovr_forms/test_STATE.py
• when the form is tested, add it to the OVR_FORMS dict in app/ovr_forms/__init__.py

Testing

• fill tests/secrets.yml with valid identification information. ensure dates are iso-formatted strings
• eg NY: first_name: John middle_name: Q last_name: Public date_of_birth: "1950-12-25" address: 314 Test St city: Schenectady state: NY zip: 12345 phone: 123-456-7890 email: text@example.com state_id_number: NONE, ssn_last4: 0000, political_party: No Party us_citizen:true legal_resident:true disenfranchised:false
• run python tests/run.py

Security

• Requires PyOpenSSL and ndg-httpsclient for improved SSL certificate validation. California's system won't validate without it...
• If an environment variable VOTEBOT_API_KEY is set, we will require all POSTs to registration endpoints /pdf and /ovr to include it in an HTTP Basic Auth header.

Deployment

• runs on Heroku under uwsgi w/ gevent
• use included compiled pdftk 2.02 binaries with heroku config:set LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/app/.heroku/vendor/lib:/app/vendor/pdftk/lib heroku config:set PATH=/app/.heroku/python/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/app/vendor/pdftk/bin
• alternately, write a Dockerfile for your favorite cloud host (and send us a pull-request?)