Check existing ids before adding/updating legislator records - Githubissues

aclu-national / elections-api

An API for retrieving locally-relevant structured data about US elections

https://elections.api.aclu.org/v2/

MIT License

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Check existing ids before adding/updating legislator records #65

Closed kokonakajima closed 2 years ago

kokonakajima commented 3 years ago

Ran into this issue when adding new legislator records for the 117th session:

We currently use a legislator's first and last name (as listed in unitedstates/legislators.current.yaml) to construct the path to their json data file. Sometimes the first or last name listed changes between data updates, causing the script to create new json records instead of updating existing ones. This leads to duplicate legislator records and multiple aclu_ids assigned to the same person.

This PR prevents duplicate records by cross-referencing legislators' bioguide IDs, which shouldn't change between data updates.