Description

• use query parameter properly (every query should do this)
• check for exceptional values of elt and elt[0]
• update changelog for release

Fixes #1533

Checklist

• I added this contribution to the changelog.md file.
• I added my name to the AUTHORS file (or it's already there).
• To lint and format the code, I ran

  uv run ruff check && uv run ruff format && uv run mypy --install-types .