The Alabama Legislature may have fixed the Mardi Gras problem for next year’s presidential primary. That election falls on Feb. 5, the same day as Fat Tuesday. A bill passed by the Legislature on Thursday would allow Mobile and Baldwin County residents to use early voting, but unfortunately the privilege was not extended to the rest of the state.

More than 30 states already allow some form of early voting, which is essentially on-site absentee voting without the doctor’s excuse. However, Alabama so far had resisted the practice, perhaps because of our paranoia of absentee voting fraud.

In early March, the Weekly suggested early voting as a way around the potential problems in Mobile, where parade routes, crowds, traffic and sobriety (or lack of) would have made voting in several precincts all but impossible. Without the change, the move to the Feb. 5 primary might not have won approval from the Justice Department.

Last year, the Legislature voted to move the Alabama presidential primary forward in order to raise the prominence of the state in presidential politics. In fact, the idea was so good that more than 20 states have decided to do the same. Political junkies have now dubbed that date “Super-Duper Tuesday.”

And last month delegate-loaded Florida decided to skip even further ahead in line, all the way to Jan. 29. The move poses a huge problem for both parties, which have tried unsuccessfully to avoid the heavy front-loading, but the Democrats face and even pricklier problem. According to party rules, any state that moves ahead of Feb. 5 would lose half of its delegates and any candidates who campaigned in that state would lose all the delegates they won there.

The primary front-loading has left many campaigns uneasy about how to approach the election, which is normally a much slower, deliberate process. Instead of campaigning in one state at a time, candidates must now cast a wider, national net.

The good news: We’ll probably know the nominees by Ash Wednesday.