An API aspiring to offer a programmatic layer on top of the official Election's Canada Voter Registration tool.
Working API available at can-ereg-api.herokuapp.com.
- Confirms voter registration info. This is the bare minimum to make this interesting.
- Updates voter registration info. This is arguably a bad idea, but might be interesting. This would require submitting driver's license number.
- Checks multiple addresses. This will be helpful when you just want to submit your address history and find out where you're registered.
- Allows access via API key. We bypass Election Canada's captcha, so we'll need to restrict access to the API, contingent on developer account creation.
- Accepts partial addresses. We'll use the Google Maps geocoder to resolve them to full addresses for our lookup.
- Signed API responses. We'll generate and send JSON web tokens in responses.*
* This will allow client-side API requests (ie. requests from user's browser), that can then be forwarded to a third-party. The third party has assurance that this response data came from this API and has not been altered. The user's browser would be requesting a single voter registration check (for the user), and sending it to a third-party service. This will in theory minimize the chances that we'll be violating terms of service on the Elections Canada web tool.
Since the form submission of the Elections Canada tool is a long-running
operation, we built this API around a Celery task queue. We made it as
RESTful as possible, given this constraint. Taking this approach, we
with POST to a /checks endpoint to queue a new check, and return a
resource identifier where the client will need to follow-up in order to
learn the result.
Resources:
Bob wishes the Government of Canada offered a digital identity system, but an official one is years away. But he's impatient, and wants to start experimenting (as Estonia has done) sooner rather than later. He decides to bootstrap his own identity system, on which he can experiment with offering cryptographic identities and authorize third-party applications via OAuth or OpenID Connect, while ensuring each identity is paired to a genuine citizen with reasonably high assurances.
Bob designs a system that allows people to enter the address at which they're registered to vote. He confirms that this information matches a registered voter via the Voting Registration API. He then creates a tentative user account, which is not yet verified. Behind the scenes, he then uses a simple postal API (like Lob to send postcards to the registered address. The postcards include a code that, on receipt in the mail, can be used to verify the account. This in effect activates is and marks it as being tied to a verified citizen.
Now Bob can build services for fellow citizens that have high assurance of accounts being owned by citizens. These services can, with the permission of the user, also ask for access to granular information about the verified user location -- city ward, federal riding, neighborhood, or even exact address. Users can share information with these services to the level of specificity that they are comfortable with.
What's more, Bob can easily allow any other citizen-run project to leverage his identity system for login. These services will have access to all the security promises and benefits of the OpenID Connect standard.
- Related: id.c4nada.ca proof-of-concept (based on
login.govcodebase)
Alice is building a liquid democratic voting platform to help city councillors understand how citizens in their districts feel about certain issues. A councillor needs to have faith that that the information truthfully reflects the views of citizens they represent. Alice's platform has Facebook integration, but Alice has been told that councillors (rightfully) don't trust Facebook names and addresses to be correct.
Thanksfully, Alice can use this Voter Registration API to improve the situation. She can now add a layer of verification on accounts, indicating when a Facebook account's address and name match a registered voter. Now the councillors can have higher confidence that the data is truly representative, and the citizen's views expressed via the platform can be more fully respected.
- Install Redis
- Install Heroku Command Line
mkvirtualenv can-ereg-api --python=`which python3`
pip install -r requirements.txt
workon can-ereg-api
The automated voter registration check involves solving a captcha. This can be done either (1) manually (default) or (2) automatically. The former involves manually solving the captcha mid-scrape, by openning it in its own window. The scraper waits until you submit a solution, then continues. The latter automates this step by using Anti-Captcha, a captcha-solving service that features API support. You can enable this by setting the proper environment variable before running the scraper:
export ANTICAPTCHA_API_KEY=<my-api-key>
For now scraper can be run directly, via queued celery task, or in full as an API:
scrapy crawl voter_registration
Since there can be no human interaction in a queued task, we must use the Anti-Captcha service.
In one terminal, run the celery process:
celery worker --app=tasks --loglevel=info
In another terminal, run:
python example.py
This is most easily run using Heroku CLI:
# Set an environment variable that Heroku CLI will load
echo ANTICAPTCHA_API_KEY=<my-api-key> > .env
# Run the two processes from the Procfile
huroku local
You can then explore the local API via:
http://localhost:5000/
