In August 2016, the Alabama legislature, meeting in special session, passed HB 19. It went into effect immediately. It was introduced August 15, 2016, and was entirely enacted on August 24, 2016. It says that write-in votes should not be counted unless the total number of write-ins for a particular office is greater than the margin between the winning candidate’s total and the second-place candidate’s vote total.

Alabama never has had a write-in declaration of candidacy law. Until this law took effect, all write-ins were valid and all were to be counted. In past presidential elections, the Secretary of State would not tally any write-in state totals, but the counties were required to tally write-ins and to report them to the Secretary of State. Although the Secretary of State would not tally statewide totals for any write-in candidate, the Secretary would include copies of the county write-in results on his web page. So, in the past, it was possible for anyone to tally them, but because the state totals didn’t come from the Secretary of State, none of the books that tally nationwide election returns would ever include any Alabama write-in totals. Therefore, in practice, HB 19 won’t have much effect.

The bill was initiated by Alabama county election officials, who disliked doing the work of recording the write-in votes. Thanks to Joshua Cassity for this news.