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unitedstates / congress-legislators

Members of the United States Congress, 1789-Present, in YAML/JSON/CSV, as well as committees, presidents, and vice presidents.
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Possible missing FEC code for Senator Pete Ricketts #918

Closed spenser-brinkman closed 7 months ago

spenser-brinkman commented 8 months ago

legislators-current.yaml correctly lists S6NE00129 as an FEC code for Pete Ricketts, but a separate data vendor partnered with my organization also lists S4NE00173 as an FEC code of Sen. Ricketts. The vendor's rep states that S6NE00129 is for the 2026 election, whereas S4NE00173 is for the upcoming 2024 election.

I'm leaning towards thinking that they are mistaken, but before I go back and tell our paid partner that they are wrong, I want to first check with the contributors here to verify what I am being told and to see if the "missing" FEC code can be added to the API here.

JoshData commented 8 months ago

The FEC does assign multiple IDs to candidates. This always happens if they run for House, Senate, or the President - they get an ID that starts with H, S, and P, I think. Having two IDs that start with the same letter is... unusual? unprecedented?

The source of truth here is FEC.gov. While the first ID resolves to a person and lists 2024 election info:

https://www.fec.gov/data/candidate/S6NE00129/?tab=about-candidate

the second ID does not:

https://www.fec.gov/data/candidate/S4NE00173/

It is possible the FEC assigned a new ID mistakenly and then purged it.

spenser-brinkman commented 7 months ago

Understood, thanks for the insight!