Nebraska

Of 283 state-level contests certified for 2026, 10 are partisan and 273 are not. The unicameral Legislature is officially nonpartisan and prints no party beside a candidate's name, while the Public Service Commission is partisan — so partisanship attaches to the office, never to the tier. A pipeline that infers party from level, or that builds its office inventory out of party primaries, sees a tenth of this state and misses the Legislature entirely.

Natural Resources Districts are drawn on watersheds. All 23 cross county lines, 42 of the 93 counties lie in more than one, Butler, Platte and Rock each sit in four, and Lower Loup reaches 16 counties. Their 182 board seats outnumber every other state-level office combined. Containment fails in both directions at once — no district fits inside a county and no county contains a whole district — so any hierarchy that nests districts under counties cannot represent the largest elected structure in the state.

Six of 93 counties are run by an election commissioner appointed by the Governor to a four-year term; the other 87 are run by the elected county clerk. Section 32-207 makes the office mandatory above 100,000 inhabitants, but Hall, Buffalo and Platte are all far below that and have one anyway, so population does not predict membership and the set has to be read rather than derived. The six cover 44.9% of precincts and 62.9% of registered voters, and the Nebraska Supreme Court has held that commissioners are not county officers — so the administrator of a county's election may not be a county official at all.

In Nebraska the word is a voter registration category — 282,028 people are registered Nonpartisan, alongside Republican, Democratic, Libertarian and Legal Marijuana NOW. It is also the ballot status of 273 of 283 state contests. And it is the constitutional character of the Legislature itself. A matcher keying on the string hits a party field, an office attribute and a chamber description, which are three unrelated facts that happen to share a word.

The Secretary of State's election office directory carries a stable numeric key beside each county — Douglas 1, Lancaster 2, Hall 8, Buffalo 9, Platte 10. It reads like a size ordering and mostly behaves like one, which is the trap: Sarpy is number 59 and is the third-largest county in the state. The key is historical and does not track anything current, so sorting or joining on it produces an order that is right at the top and badly wrong in the middle.

A candidate reaches the November ballot as a major-party nominee out of the May primary, as the nominee of a recognized minor party — Legal Marijuana NOW and the Libertarians both hold ballot status here — or By Petition, which is a filing route rather than a party and is printed as such. The certified U.S. Senate field carries one of each. A schema with a party column and nothing else has to put By Petition somewhere, and every choice it makes is wrong.

The Board of State Canvassers' official report for the May 12 primary opens with a Reported Problems section. This cycle it records that Washington County placed a Learning Community Coordinating Council subcouncil contest on every ballot style in the county rather than only the four eligible ones, and that the error did not change an outcome because four candidates sought four nominations. It is a boundary error — a subdivision that does not align with county ballot styles — and it is in the certified record rather than in a news story.

Nebraska puts municipal, village and school elections on the same even-year primary and general as the state, which is the exact opposite of Iowa across the river, where the entire local layer votes in odd Novembers. Two neighbouring states in the same structural family invert each other on the single question of when local government is elected, so a regional assumption inherited from either one is wrong about the other.