On September 20 I put a page on this site about how a sitting Nebraska official voted in 2021. I did not tell him. I did not tell the woman running against him. For three days the record sat there, public, with nobody in that race knowing it existed. A script found it. I did not.
On Monday, September 14, I drove to Lincoln and spoke for three minutes at the Nebraska Medical Cannabis Commission. I asked for two things: publish the count of how many Nebraskans hold a practitioner recommendation, and say so plainly if nobody keeps that number.
Then I came home and did the homework that the meeting started. That is what this site is. Somebody says something in a public room, and I go and check it against the record, and I publish what the record says whether it helps my question or not.
One of those threads led to the Attorney General. When he was a state senator in 2021, he voted on a medical cannabis bill. I wanted to know how. The Legislature publishes the transcript, so I read it — all 214 pages of one day — and on September 20 I published what it said.
The page is What Hilgers Said About LB474 in 2021. It reports, from the Clerk of the Legislature's own floor transcript for May 12, 2021, that Sen. Mike Hilgers rose in opposition to the bill, voted yes on a motion to shelve it, and voted no on cloture. It quotes his reasoning at length — federal preemption, the Supremacy Clause, the Controlled Substances Act.
It also prints the parts that cut his way, because a page that leaves those out is a caricature and I would not believe it either:
“The answer to this problem is not in this Legislature. And that's not because I don't want it to be in the Legislature, I do think it should be in the Legislature.”
“I absolutely get the frustration for proponents of this bill.”
I stand behind the page. Every line on it traces to a primary document. That is not the problem.
This site has one rule I repeat more than any other: we publish the record, not the adjective. There is a second rule underneath it that matters just as much. If I print what a candidate did, that candidate gets to answer — and so does the person running against them, in the same words, on the same day.
Mike Hilgers is on your ballot on November 3, running for re-election as Attorney General. His opponent is Jocelyn Brasher. On September 20 I published his voting record and told neither of them. Not by decision. I simply did not know the race was there.
For three days, this site — the one whose whole argument is that it treats everybody on a ballot the same way — had a page about one candidate's record and nothing about the other, and neither of them had been asked a single question.
Not by being careful. I was being careful. I had been careful for three days.
I found it by accident, chasing something else entirely. Two current state senators are named Meyer, and a 2025 roll call listed only one “Meyer,” so I could not tell which of them had voted. Rather than guess, I traced the seat — District 41.
What I found there was a seat that had changed hands three times in two years. A senator resigned in 2023 to become State Treasurer. An appointee finished that term. Someone else won the seat in 2024 and then resigned in January 2026. The same appointee was put back in the next day. Which answered my Meyer question — and told me something I had no idea about:
District 41 has a special election on November 3, 2026. Two candidates, six weeks out, and I had never heard of it. It was on the certified ballot the whole time.
That is when it stopped being a lucky catch and started being a problem. If I missed an entire race by reading, what else was I missing by reading?
The Secretary of State publishes a certified list of everyone on the ballot. It is a PDF. It is not a secret. It has been sitting there since September 11.
I wrote something that reads that list and compares it against two things: the roster of people this site has actually contacted, and every page on this site that is actually live. Then it asks one question. Do we publish about somebody who is on the ballot, and if so, has the person running against them ever been contacted?
It found the ballot has 49 races and 150 candidates. This site's outreach roster covered three of them.
And it sorted Mike Hilgers to the top of the list of people I had published about and never written to — because he has a page of his own, which weighs more than a name in a directory. The script found in about a second what I had walked past for three days.
Both letters went out on September 23, within a few minutes of each other. Six questions, byte-identical in both — I check that with a comparison, not with my intentions. The rule is both on the same day or neither, and both went.
The two letters are not identical everywhere, and they cannot be. One of these people has a page about his record on this site and the other has nothing. So his letter names the page, recites what it says about him, and asks him to correct anything wrong. Hers says plainly that nothing is published about her, and that this is a flaw rather than a compliment.
Even how I reach them is unequal, and both letters say so. She filed a campaign email address with the state. He filed a phone number and no email, so his letter goes to his office's published public contact — an official channel, but a general inbox that may never reach him. If it bounces, that will be printed as could not be delivered, which is not the same thing as did not answer, and I will keep looking for a better address.
The same afternoon, the same kind of pair went to Joe Johnson and Jeremy Heneger, the two candidates in that District 41 special election I did not know existed on Monday. Four letters, two races, one day, and every one of them copied to this site's own inbox so there is a record I cannot quietly edit later.
A thing that worked, for once. This project has an automatic check that is supposed to run before any letter leaves, and refuse to let a cold letter into a race where one candidate has been asked and another has not. While checking it today I found it had been pointing at the wrong name for eleven days and had never once run. I fixed it an hour before these letters. It ran on all four. That is two failures found in one day by looking at the machinery instead of trusting it.
Writing this while it is unfinished is the point, so here is the rest of it, plainly:
The Hilgers gap is closed — the script now reports his race as covered, with both candidates written to. The script also flagged Mike Flood, Adrian Smith, Brinker Harding, Bob Krist, Jana Hughes, George Dungan and Rick Holdcroft — all named on pages here, all on the ballot, none contacted, all with opponents who have never heard from me. I have not written to any of them yet.
Attorney General Opinion 19-010 is quoted on the 2021 floor and named in the official bill history. I have still never read it. I only have the parts somebody read aloud.
I have not confirmed the exact date of a 2025 remark I quote on that page. The report I have says only “a May press conference.” The page says that too.
None of the new pages have been looked at on a phone. I have checked that the server is serving the right words. I have not checked that they are readable.
Nebraska calls itself the Good Life. I believe that. I moved here in 2001 and I am raising my life here.
But you cannot draw a line if you cannot see the ground. I spent three days thinking I was standing on solid work, and I was standing on a gap I could not see because I was looking at what I had already found instead of what was out there.
The fix was not to try harder. I was already trying hard. The fix was to build something that checks the whole ballot every time, so that skipping a race becomes a decision I made instead of a thing I never knew about.
I would rather you read this than not know it. If this site is going to ask officials to publish the number they would rather not publish, it does not get to quietly fix its own mistakes. So: I published a man's voting record and did not tell him, or the woman running against him, for three days. It is fixed now. It was fixed by a script, not by me being careful. And I am telling you before anybody had to ask.