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unitedstates
Bad format for VP vote?
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.
I'd be great if you could help by filling in our documentation on the votes output so that we cover this case.
I'm not clear on what you want. Just to make a section about VP? What are your thoughts on including bioguide?
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.
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.
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?
Sure.
On March 18, 2017 7:55:50 PM EDT, Eric Mill [email protected] 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?
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