search

openstates / enhancement-proposals

Open States Enhancement Proposals
1 stars 3 forks source link

Data Needed - Start Date, End Date, Reason #39

Open asonntag opened 2 years ago

asonntag commented 2 years ago

This is the right template to select if you're reporting an issue with bill or vote data from Open States.

Issue Description: As suggested in email by @jamesturk, Everytown for Gun Safety has compiled some use cases for start date, end date and reason as related to individual legislators. Prior to v3 these fields were available for people. Now, we have start and end date associated with legislative term.

Start and end date allow us to know if a legislator has left their seat earlier than the term's end and how long they actually served. Mostly, this matters for how it relates to the end reason. End reason lets us know if someone has vacated their seat because of, for example, death, new job, illness, scandal, etc. This is helpful because it allows our programs for running legislative candidates to begin ASAP after a legislator leaves office and to run informed campaigns. For example, knowing if someone resigned in disgrace vs. whether they died would definitely change how a candidate speaks about their predecessors.

Given this settings file it appears that you all collect data regarding vacancies, which is similar to what we're requesting. Although, the reason for vacancy does not appear in this file and the data is not available via v3.

URL where this issue may be seen (API or OpenStates.org): n/a

Source URL of correct data if applicable: n/a

jamesturk commented 2 years ago

This is a great idea overall, but coverage is pretty spotty- most states do not provide the reason for a vacancy, which is part of why it isn't included in more places.

If people need the data, it'd be great if they could help collect it- if there is a commitment from 1-2 folks to help curate this, we could certainly surface the data in more places than the YAML.

edit: this may best be moved over to the enhancement-proposals issues, but I'll leave it here for a bit for more visibility so others can chime in if they're interested/able to contribute!