State Government Atlas

Documentation for this folder. Covers all 50 states (plus D.C. where noted in tables).

Structured reference for how each state organizes government, how many elected seats key organs have, who leads them, majority strength, and election timing.

What this is

Machine-readable data: data/ten_largest.json, data/remaining_states.json (merged by the build script)
HTML reports: output/index.html, output/*.html — run scripts/build_atlas.py
Electoral College: scripts/build_electoral_college.py writes output/electoral_college.html

Authoritative sources (recommended)

There is no single federal API for every field in every state; the atlas aggregates common answers and links out for live numbers.

Need	Starting points
Legislature size, sessions, process	NCSL — Legislatures (choose state)
Governor, terms, next election	NGA or Wikipedia List of governors
Live partisan seat counts	State Secretary of State / official legislature site (see NCSL list)
Trifectas and chamber control	Ballotpedia — trifectas
Court structure and selection	NCSC or the state judicial branch site

Data freshness

Chamber seat totals are set in law or constitution (they change rarely).
Governor names and next election years are maintained in JSON with a data_as_of field.
Legislative majority seats move with specials and party switches. Values marked approximate should be verified on the state legislature or Secretary of State site before analysis.

Regenerate HTML

From the fuelprices project root:

cd state_government_atlas/scripts
python3 build_atlas.py
python3 build_electoral_college.py

Requires Python 3.8+ (stdlib only for atlas build; electoral college may use additional deps as in repo).

Plain Markdown source (README.md) for editors and version control.