People that died before taking office are erroneously thought current.

[alexdutton]

Tancredo Neves was the 10th president of Brazil, but died before taking office. As such, he never stopped being president by virtue of never starting, and so is deemed "current" by our current queries.

I think this should be modelled by adding a "start date: no value" qualifier to the P39 to signify "never started", and the executive — and maybe legislative — query(ies) updated to take this into consideration.

@tmtmtmtm suggested off-GitHub using a "subject has role: president-elect" qualifier in this case, which I think is helpfully descriptive, but complicates the query if we also have to look for "governor-elect", "senator-elect", etc.

This would also need documenting within https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_every_politician/Political_data_model

[jacksonj04]

Could the query not look for the elect superclass?

[tmtmtmtm]

complicates the query if we also have to look for "governor-elect", "senator-elect", etc.

Well, in a query, you'd presumably look for anything that was P279*: Q1326365 rather than enumerating any of them.

How are you planning to treat anyone who does have various "has role" qualifiers on their P39? The two most common there are "acting" and "interim". Are you accepting those as de facto officeholders anyway, or will you need to treat those differently?

[tmtmtmtm]

A more general point here though, is that decisions like this really need to be made on-wiki. There are at least a couple of potentially valid approaches, and unless there's community consensus on which one to use, we're going to end up with a situation where everyone just does whichever seems to make most sense to them, and thus queries will become even more complex as they'll ned to handle all scenarios.