Normally I don't blog about the actual ColdFusion web applications I create at the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP). Most of them are extranet applications inaccessible to the public and computerize business processes that would take too long to explain. But my most recent application doesn't fit the normal mold and it's received some attention from the local media because of what it does.
The application is an online application form for registering to vote in the State of Maryland in November designed specifically for our students at the university. It was commissioned by our undergraduate Student Government Association (SGA) as part of a larger, multi-faceted effort to get out the vote this year, and supported by the university administration and the State Board of Elections (who provided the guidelines for how the data would be collected and sent to them).
The application runs on Adobe ColdFusion 9 and uses FW/1 as its application framework. The model is comprised of record and service objects, all written in script syntax, with the service objects instantiated via ColdSpring. Most of the client and server-side validation is handled by ValidateThis, and the application is styled with Bootstrap as well as some custom CSS and a bit of jQuery.
After reading the introduction page, students log into the application using our university's single-sign on solution. As soon as they're logged in, the system pulls information about the student from our LDAP system. That information is used to pre-populate certain form fields (name, date of birth, etc.) and it also affects the behavior of the application. For example, if the LDAP information indicates that the student has a home ("permanent") address in Maryland that is different from their current on-campus / near-campus address, it will show both addresses to the student and let them choose which one they want to use as their residential/voting address.
But if the student only has one Maryland address on file, they're only presented with one set of address form fields. And in both cases, the addresses pulled from LDAP are formatted to conform to the way the state recognizes voter street addresses, making it more likely that the submitted address exactly matches an address on file with the state (that part took awhile: the state parses street addresses in a rather unique manner).
In short: if the LDAP information is accurate and up-to-date, most students can complete the online registration without ever typing a key on the keyboard.
Perhaps the coolest part of the application is the last step prior to the review page. In that step, the student has to acknowledge that they understand the legal requirements to vote. They acknowledge this by clicking on a checkbox next to an image of their electronic signature. When students enroll at UMCP and get their student photo ID, they write their signature on an electronic pad, and the signature is stored in binary format in a database table. It was the fact that we had these signatures on file that made this project viable, because the new Maryland law that permits online voter registration made the submission of a signature a mandatory requirement. And thanks to ColdFusion's image manipulation functions, rendering that binary data as an image takes but one line of code.
Admittedly, we did run into one issue with the signatures: some of the older ones were stored in a proprietary format that couldn't be read outside of the ID card system. But we found an option in that software that let us export large batches of those signatures as JPEG files, and from there I used ColdFusion's image functions to reduce each image to a reasonable size and write them to a new database table in binary format.
Once the student reaches the review page and submits their voter registration application, the form data is written to a table record and their electronic signature is output as a file to a directory outside the web root. And every night a scheduled task runs that writes out all the new registration records to a data file in the format specified by the state and uploads that file and the related signatures files to a server run by the state.
And, like most of the applications I build, there is also an administrative interface that certain individuals can log into to view some anonymous registration statistics and to update the list of politicial parties currently recognized by the state (as they change from year to year).
The system went live October 1st, and as of right now over 1650 students have used it to submit voter registration applications. The SGA is promoting the application at every opportunity and they're hoping to get to 2,000 registrations before the October 16th deadline. While that might not seem like a huge number, I believe it would be the highest number of on-campus registrations since the SGA started doing voter registration drives several years ago.
Once we hit the October 16th deadline, we'll shut down the application until after the election has past, then reopen it. The goal is to let the system accept registrations year-round, and I already have a few small improvements planned based on user and stakeholder feedback. I also need to add a tool or two to the administrative interface so the stakeholders can run the system without my help.
But otherwise, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, and so are the SGA and the other stakeholders.
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