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Oil Change International State DEM Project
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All nebraska Legislators appear as "non-partisan" #29

Closed skyebend closed 11 years ago

skyebend commented 11 years ago

... but they do have party affiliations, at least as reported by wiki:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebraska_Legislature

michalgm commented 11 years ago

But they are officially non-partisan - somehow. Anyway, the parties aren't in any of the open data, so we'd need to fill it all in by hand

On 07/25/2013 02:06 PM, Skye Bender-deMoll wrote:

... but they do have party affiliations, at least as reported by wiki:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebraska_Legislature

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/michalgm/state_dem/issues/29.

michalgm commented 11 years ago

Just confirmed - they show up as non-partisan in openstates, transparency data, votesmart, and nimsp data. The party designations shown on wikipedia are unofficial. From wikipedia: Members are selected in nonpartisan elections. Rather than separate primaries held to choose Republican, Democratic, and other partisan contenders for a seat, Nebraska uses a single nonpartisan primary election, in which the top two vote-getters are entitled to run in the general election. There are no formal party alignments or groups within the Legislature. Coalitions tend to form issue by issue based on a member's philosophy of government, geographic background, and constituency. However, almost all the members of the legislature are known to be either Democrats or Republicans, and the state branches of both parties explicitly endorse candidates for legislative seats.[5] As an illustration of how partisanship can intrude upon the officially nonpartisan chamber, in January 2010 it was reported that the Legislature debated whether or not there was partisanship in Legislature, and "then finished the talk with a vote that followed party lines."[6] The unofficial partisan makeup of the Nebraska Legislature is 30 Republicans, 17 Democrats and two independents.

michalgm commented 11 years ago

I'm closing this as 'wontfix'. If you think we should manually enter party info from some other data source, feel free to reopen.