Well you see, about 120 years ago, city governments in Alabama were passing local ordinances to try to treat black people slightly less like subhumans. The very fine people of the Alabama state government decided they couldn't be letting that kind of thing go on, so they rewrote the constitution to centralize 100% of governmental authority directly into the constitution, as written by the state government. Ever since, absolutely no act of governance happens in the state without having the state legislature go through the full constitutional amendment process.

All acts of the Alabama government come in the form of constitutional amendments. They literally do not have "laws" like any other state or country does. In order to hold a referendum, they have to pass an amendment to authorize the referendum.

If they want to so much as rename a post office in some sleepy little town, they have to pass a constitutional amendment.

> What on Earth makes their constitution so long?

Alabama's legislative process is... special. They don't have a regular old code of laws like basically any other sovereign entity on the planet. Rather, every single act of government in the state of Alabama, from statewide tax codes to your local city council renaming a school, comes in the form of a constitutional amendment.

The "fun" part about this whole setup is that the reason they organized their state government this way was because right around the turn of the 20th century, the KKK types who dominated the state government got really upset that city governments were undermining Jim Crow state policies with local ordinances, so they abolished all non-Constitutional legal code to consolidate 100% of political power in the state government. Specifically so they could force people to be more racist.

Edit: I did some more reading after I woke up this morning. The legislative process is not quite as bad as I originally said. Statewide laws can indeed be regular bills like other states have. It's every level below that whose governance that must be explicitly authorized by Constitutional amendment. Though since most issues of day-to-day life are matters of local governance, in practice this means that an astronomical amount of Alabama government goes through amendments.

The racism thing is 100% true though. The delegates who originally wrote the Alabama constitution explicitly said their goal was to enshrine white supremacy in the state constitution.