Alabama

SCOTUS vacated Alabama's map ruling eight days before the May 19 primary. The legislature redrew four congressional districts in special session, courts volleyed through May, and on June 2 the Supreme Court reinstated the 2023 map — voiding the May votes in CDs 1, 2, 6 and 7. Those districts and two state Senate seats re-ran their primaries August 11 with the majority-runoff rule suspended: plurality nominated. A scraper that treats 'the primary' as one event per office attaches voided votes to the general pipeline.

No Alabama county has an elected election supervisor. The chief election official is the judge of probate — a judicial officer wearing an administrative hat — chairing a canvassing board of probate judge, sheriff, and circuit clerk. Election pages live under probate-court websites, not election-office domains, and Jefferson County's 'Election Commission' is the same statutory trio under a local name, with two probate divisions and two absentee offices in one county.

Voter registration is not the election administrator's job. Each county's three-member board of registrars is appointed by the Governor, State Auditor, and Commissioner of Agriculture and Industries acting as a state board (§17-3-2) — with local-act exceptions per county, and a separate scheme for Jefferson. A canvasser who petitions the probate judge about the rolls is at the wrong desk.

There is no party registration — voters choose a ballot at the polls. Any race short of a majority goes to a runoff four weeks later (May 19 → June 16 this cycle), and the 2017 crossover ban means voting in one party's primary locks you out of the other's runoff. The interval itself has moved between cycles — never hardcode it.

Every judicial election is a party contest — Supreme Court, two separate intermediate appellate courts (civil and criminal), circuit and district benches. There are no retention questions and no nonpartisan judicial ballots. A parser trained on Florida's 'Shall Justice X be retained' misclassifies every Alabama judicial race — and this year no Democrat filed for any appellate seat.

All 105 House and all 35 Senate seats elect November 3, 2026 to four-year terms — and then not again until 2030. A coverage model that expects staggered legislative races every two years schedules phantom 2028 contests across 140 districts.

Cities and towns never share the state ballot or the state results feed. Most of the 462 municipalities voted August 2025 on a quadrennial cycle that recent legislation moved out of the presidential year — next regular round 2029 — while Huntsville runs its own cycle and votes August 25, 2026. Each municipality canvasses its own returns (§11-46-55); results publish town by town through city clerks.

A local constitutional amendment passed unanimously by the legislature appears only on the affected county's ballot — one dissenting vote forces it statewide. Two different 'Amendment 1's can run simultaneously in different counties, and the recompiled 2022 constitution already arranges 134 local provisions by county. Keying amendments by number alone double-counts or mis-scopes them.