Perhaps my thoughts and notes can be of some use.
I wanted to share some notes I made (along with another Ruby/Rails developer,
Nick) about the argument and design for an open voting API:
https://github.com/djwonk/voting/wiki/API
Just now, I wrote up some notes on my blog, too:
http://djwonk.tumblr.com/post/42305919307/better-online-voting