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unitedstates / congress

Public domain data collectors for the work of Congress, including legislation, amendments, and votes.
https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/wiki
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Bad format for VP vote? #204

Open GoldenJoe opened 7 years ago

GoldenJoe commented 7 years ago

While parsing the voting records for the 115th congress, my script broke on s54. Upon examining the script, I realized that there is a "VP" string value in the ['votes']['Yea'] array:

"Yea": [ "VP", { "display_name": "Alexander (R-TN)", "first_name": "Lamar", "id": "S289", "last_name": "Alexander", "party": "R", "state": "TN" },

I assume this means that the vice president voted on the issue, but is this an appropriate way to represent the data? Everyone else is represented by bioguide/lis identifier keys in an array. If you wanted to look up voting records of years past, you'd have to go out of your way to figure out who the VP was at that time.

JoshData commented 7 years ago

I'd be great if you could help by filling in our documentation on the votes output so that we cover this case.

GoldenJoe commented 7 years ago

I'm not clear on what you want. Just to make a section about VP? What are your thoughts on including bioguide?

konklone commented 7 years ago

Pence has a Bioguide ID, I think all VPs get them, for this reason: http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=P000587

We shouldn't be mixing in the string "VP" in an array that is otherwise made of dicts. @GoldenJoe A fix here would be awesome if you're up for making it.

JoshData commented 7 years ago

Please no. People are using these files (possibly/hopefully) through GovTrack's bulk data, so I am committed to the data format, until I discontinue the bulk data in the summer.

konklone commented 7 years ago

OK, not my intent to interfere in a working pipeline, though it's a pretty reasonable thing to point out -- would this be reasonable as a TODO once the bulk data is retired?

JoshData commented 7 years ago

Sure.

On March 18, 2017 7:55:50 PM EDT, Eric Mill notifications@github.com wrote:

OK, not my intent to interfere in a working pipeline, though it's a pretty reasonable thing to point out -- would this be reasonable as a TODO once the bulk data is retired?

-- You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/issues/204#issuecomment-287583824

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