To be honest, I wasn't surprised at all as soon as I saw "It's written using (...) Ruby on Rails (...) and (...) MySQL (...)" - seriously, for a project where p

To be honest, I wasn't surprised at all as soon as I saw "It's written using (...) Ruby on Rails (...) and (...) MySQL (...)" - seriously, for a project where pretty much the only requirement is security, why go with such a complicated stack? Just run a couple hundred lines of code on a high-security processor (or a custom-made hardened chip); if you really must allow internet voting, you could at least take a highly-secure OS and wire up a trusted HTTP server to a well-audited hundred-line CGI program.