South Carolina, Arkansas and Louisiana all provide for Instant-Runoff Voting in party primaries, for overseas absentee ballots. A bill to do the same in Alabama had passed the Alabama House on March 16. However, the Alabama Senate refused to consider the bill, and it cannot now pass. Instead, the Alabama legislature passed SB 529 and sent it to the Governor.

SB 529 expands the time interval between the first primary and the run-off primary, from 3 weeks, to 6 weeks. The whole motivation for southern states to use IRV had been that there isn’t enough time to send ballots back and forth between Alabama and overseas locations (southern states are the only states that hold run-off primaries). So, the Alabama legislature solved the problem in an unimaginative manner, unlike the legislatures of three of her sister states in the south.