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.

Last week Al Gore said he favors eliminating the electoral college. According to this article in The Hill, on December 5 he endorsed the national popular vote plan.

On December 5, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two racial gerrymandering cases, one from North Carolina and one from Virginia. The North Carolina transcript is here. That case is McCrory v Harris.

Here is the transcript of the argument in the Virginia case, Bethune-Hill v Virginia State Board of Elections. Thanks to Scotusblog for the links.

UPDATE: here is the New York Times story about the arguments.