Open Knowledge Labs, part of the Open Knowledge Foundation, writes about open data tools such as table parsers, data packages and data matching.
HN links it for open data tooling, like PDF text extraction tools and the Bundesgit project, which one commenter calls solid but laborious to run.
From your description I am missing one important idea that you should communicate clearly: you, we and nobody else currently wants to have online voting - what we want to have, are tools that enable transparency and gathering of information, also discussions and preparation of decisions, but the final decision is something you do NOT want to do online.
See this talk from 31C3:
http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6344_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412281400_-_security_analysis_of_estonia_s_internet_voting_system_-_j_alex_halderman.html
If you still believe that online voting is doable and a great thing, please contact Mr. Halderman and talk to him or read about his work: https://jhalderm.com/
Also I recommend to do some research what the german pirate party is using regarding democracy tools - they have a lot of experience not only coding such tools, but also with real life usage.
A good start could be https://liqd.net/en/
here you can find the adhocracy platform:
https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy/
which seems to be in a much better developed state than what I see on democracyOS - but maybe there are many things not visible right now to me, so sorry for this criticism.
Adhocracy is currently in use by several organizations and they have lots of real life experience, especially with user adaption.
An interesting application of adhocracy is https://offenekommune.de/
Another interesting tool for organizing (really big) meetings: http://openslides.org/en/
and of course…
FYI: I've built a datapackage manager called datapak in ruby [1][2]. datapak supports the tabular datapackages (.csv with .json schema) from the frictionless data initiative (by the open knowledge foundation). All open source and public domain. See some examples such as the Standard&Poors 500. By default the datapackage gets auto-added from .csv to an in-memory SQLite database for easy querying etc. Thanks to ActiveRecord you can use PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.
[1] https://github.com/textkit/datapak
[2] http://okfnlabs.org/blog/2015/04/26/datapak.html
"Have you considered creating a bit of javascript that any site can embed on their site that would allow a visitor to annotate?"
Yes, we have. It's there on the front page if you scroll down! http://annotateit.org/#develop
"Also, have you considered making it anonymous to start like github:gist?"
Well, you can certainly try out Annotator using the demo at http://okfnlabs.org/annotator/demo/
cto here - I signed up to work on Grist because I like the UI, like it as a spreadsheet format, and think it has potential for decent version control - something lacking in data projects, and that I've been interested in for way too long - here I am ranting in 2013 https://okfnlabs.org/blog/2013/08/08/diffing-and-patching-data.html
Yes, PDFMiner in Python https://github.com/euske/pdfminer
Apache PDFBox in Java https://pdfbox.apache.org
Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11327493
For a list of others, see http://okfnlabs.org/blog/2016/04/19/pdf-tools-extract-text-and-data-from-pdfs.html
You might also be interested in recline.js (http://okfnlabs.org/recline/), a fork of Google refine, initially created by @maxogden, now maintained by the Open Knowledge Foundation (okfn).
How their data processing features differ from openRefine is not clear to me though...