I went looking for one specific claim on two Nebraska Governor campaign sites. I didn't find it. What I found instead was a candidate whose ballot status had changed twice in three weeks — and a reminder of something bigger than this one race: Nebraska is 49 states' worth of company away from being the only place this matters.
Last night's homework was a Senate debate. Tonight I widened the lens one notch — Nebraska's other statewide race, Governor, and one specific question: were either campaign making a tariff claim the way Dan Osborn did in the Senate debate?
I checked both sites — Governor Pillen's and Lynne Walz's, homepage and issues pages, plus two searches. Neither campaign has put a number on tariffs right now. That's a real answer, not a dead end: "nobody's made a specific claim about this yet" is exactly as true and exactly as worth knowing as catching a wrong number.
But checking those two pages meant reading the whole race table on our own homework page again, closely, for the first time in a while. And one row in it was wrong.
Our table listed Brett Lindstrom — a third name in the Governor's race — as running nonpartisan, with his running mate marked "not yet found." Both things were true the day that page was built. Neither is true now. Here's what actually happened in between:
Lindstrom's nonpartisan petition drive comes up short — 3,358 of the required 4,000 signatures validated. A hired signature-gathering firm's work turns up "a significant number" flagged for fraud. He's off the ballot.
Lindstrom refiles — this time as the America First Party's candidate, with Mike Picard as his running mate. He's back on the November ballot, under a different label than before.
We catch it, fix the row, and cite both events. See it corrected →
Nothing here is a judgment about the fraud finding or about switching parties. It's the sequence, dated. A page is only as current as the day someone last checked it — that's true of ours as much as anyone's, and it's exactly why we caught this one ourselves instead of waiting for someone to write in.
A while back we built a page counting everyone registered with the FEC for federal races nationwide — 4,290 people, against roughly 470 seats. The honest line on that page is that FEC registration isn't ballot qualification. The FEC doesn't decide who's actually on your ballot. Your state does.
Lindstrom's month is that sentence made real. He wasn't a hypothetical "registered but not qualified" case — he was, specifically, for three weeks in August, someone who wanted to run and legally couldn't, until he found a different door onto the same ballot. That's not a federal story and it wouldn't show up in an FEC count at all, because Governor isn't a federal office. Every state runs this process its own way, on its own timeline, for its own offices.
| Covered now | Where |
|---|---|
| Every member of the current Congress — money, votes, attendance, real office contacts | The Money Board |
| Everyone registered with the FEC for 2026 federal races, all 50 states | Who Is Running? |
| Voting deadlines and how to register, all 50 states + DC | How to Vote |
| Nebraska's Governor race, closely — both candidates, the field, sourced | Your Homework |
| Nebraska's federal delegation and Senate race, closely — debates checked, money tracked | This blog, and the debate fact-check |
Not covered yet: Governor's races in the other 49 states. State legislatures
outside Nebraska's Unicameral. Local and county races almost anywhere. The who-is-running
count is federal-only — it says nothing about who's running for your state's governor, your
city council, or your school board, because that data doesn't come from the FEC at all. One person
building this, state by state, race by race, as time allows. Nebraska got looked at closely because
it's home. Everywhere else is genuinely open, and genuinely needed.
The method here isn't secret and it isn't hard: find your state's Secretary of State site (it's
always a .gov), find your state's real campaign-finance filer (not always the FEC —
Nebraska's is NADC, and every state runs its own), and read what's actually filed instead of what
a headline says was filed. That's the whole job. It just takes someone who lives there to notice
when a fact like Lindstrom's has quietly gone stale.
If you're reading this from outside Nebraska and you want your own state's race looked at with this kind of attention — email hello@wethepeopleoftheusofa.com and say which state and which race. That's not a form into a void; a real person reads it, and it's exactly how the next state gets picked.
Both links are cited directly on the corrected homework page. If something there is still wrong, that's exactly how you'll catch it — the same way we did.