On June 4, the Alabama legislature passed SB 148. It moves the petition deadline for independent presidential candidates from September 6, to 82 days before the general election. In 2016, that would be August 18.
The bill also moves the deadline for presidential primary candidates to file their petitions from 90 days before the presidential primary, to 116 days before the presidential primary. Presidential primary candidates need 500 signatures (or, if they wish to get 50 signatures from each U.S. House district, then they only need 350). The 2016 presidential primary will be on March 1, so presidential primary petitions will now due in December 2015, assuming the Governor signs the bill.
This is a horrible bill. The independent candidate petitions in Alabama can not start until you know who the candidates are, because Alabama does not allow candidate substitution. This really hurts minor parties, due to the fact that it is really difficult to get on the ballot in Alabama with a party label, because an unqualified party typically needs around 35,000-45,000 valid petition signatures (it varies due to election turn out) to get on the ballot. This requirement is so difficult that minor party candidates for President generally get on the ballot as independent candidates, because the independent candidate petition only requires 5,000 valid signatures.
Another reason this is a bad bill is because it gets really hot in the summer in Alabama, and moving the deadline to August 18th means that all or most of the petitioning will have to be done during the hottest time of the years. The deadline was previously September 6th, and while it can still be hot in Alabama in September, it is generally not quite as hot in September as it is in July and August.
One more reason that this is a horrible bill is because it will mean not being able to collect signatures at colleges while they are in regular session in late August and September. There are not that many good places to gather petition signatures in Alabama as the law is currently practiced, as in most of the stores & shopping centers will not allow petitioning, and they will call the police on petition circulators, and the police will not side with the petition circulators. Colleges are usually good places to gather petition signatures, especially for minor party and independent candidates, so having the petition deadline right before the colleges open for regular session will take away some of the best petitioning locations in Alabama.
This is an obvious attempt at making ballot access more difficult in Alabama. There needs to be an effort to lobby the Governor to veto this bill.