Today I wrote to everyone running for the board that runs Omaha’s electric company. I nearly repeated my own mistake from yesterday, and I made a new one. I also wrote down a promise and put a date on it, before anything is for sale anywhere.
The people who run the Omaha Public Power District are elected. Three of those seats are on the November 3 ballot, and none of the six people running for them is an incumbent. I’ve lived in Omaha since 2001.
So I built a Baby Civics 101 lesson around it: Your Electric Company Is on Your Ballot. It says only what the Secretary of State’s certified candidate list says. Everything else (how many directors there are, who votes on your rate, whether they’re paid) is in a section called where we have not looked yet, with the document to read for each one. I couldn’t open those documents from where I was working. Rather than guess, the page says so, and it asks you to read them with me.
Yesterday I wrote about publishing a man’s record and not telling him. Today I went through my own Sent folder, every email since September 9, and checked it against my list of who I’d asked.
On September 21 I’d answered one OPPD candidate’s campaign newsletter and asked him to comment. My note said the same offer went to “every other person on my list.” It hadn’t. The person running against him in the same subdivision had never heard from me. My note also went to his newsletter’s reply address, not the one he filed with the state, and it had three numbers in it I hadn’t sourced.
That’s the same shape as the mistake I wrote about yesterday. It was found the same way, by checking the record instead of trusting my memory of it.
This morning five of the six OPPD candidates got the same four questions, in the same words, at the addresses they filed with the Secretary of State. The sixth filed a phone number and no email, so she got the same offer by text. The candidate I’d written to on the 21st got one extra paragraph explaining that this letter replaces that one.
The four questions: what decision the board will face that a voter should understand first; which public record should be used to judge their term; what campaign money they won’t take; and who I should write to if I get something wrong about them. Every answer gets printed in full, unedited, dated, in the same space.
One wrote back in about twenty-five minutes. Mark Gudgel, Subdivision 02, asked whether I wanted one sentence per question. I told him yes, one sentence is plenty and there’s no length limit. Then I put that same line on the OPPD page, because if only one candidate knows the instructions, that’s an advantage I handed him. Now all six have it, dated.
I texted the sixth candidate from my phone. Before I actually had, I told the tool I work with to log it, and it did. For less than an hour my own list said all six had been asked, and my own screening script said every race was even. It wasn’t even yet.
I caught it and reversed it. The new rule is simple: a text doesn’t count as sent unless there’s a copy of the exact words. Email already works that way, because Gmail keeps everything. Texts didn’t, so now they do. Saying “I sent it” isn’t a receipt. That goes for me too.
I keep a list of everyone who has answered a question from this site. A name on it means one thing: they answered, on the date shown. It isn’t an endorsement or a score, and it says nothing about where anyone stands. Nobody gets on the list by agreeing with me.
Everyone else I’ve written to hasn’t answered yet. That’s a date, not a verdict. When they do, they go on the list the same day.
I also run a separate business, gottahaveitshops.online. Someday it may sell help setting up this kind of homework site somewhere else. Today it sells nothing connected to this site.
So today I put a promise on the How we work page, dated September 24, 2026: the record here stays free, with no account, no sign-up and no payment. No ads, no tracking. Nobody can pay to be left off a page or get a kinder one. The other business will never sell this record or a place in it.
It went up before anything is for sale, on purpose. If the store ever opens, you can check which came first.