Today is the big day: the start of the SMS voter registration. Our systems are tested and ready, but there have been a few changes to the data dashboard since the design and prototyping phase. This is the part of the system that lets the public see the progress of registration, and helps election commission staff verify numbers from the field. As the most tangible view into the data set, it needs to be easy to understand and visually impactful.

Other programmers did the initial implementation, but I’ve added made significant changes to both the presentation views and the underlying API. I’ve gotten much more familiar with Ruby and the Sinatra framework, as well as running delayed jobs and message queues on Heroku. Designing for both Arabic and English is another challenge, as it needs to be readable in both right-to-left and left-to-right layouts.

It’s been a fun challenge so far, and I’m looking forward to building a few internal tools for HNEC from scratch. After ensuring the successful voter registration, we’ll also need to generate and distribute voter rolls, which I am excited to do in pure Python.