Foster Bates lives in G-Pod, a medium-security unit of Maine State Prison, a cluster of concrete buildings that sits an hour and a half northeast of Portland in the woods of a town called Warren. G-Pod contains two tiers of locking cells, a weight machine, a few potted plants, some tables, and many hard plastic chairs. There, before each election, Bates receives an absentee ballot through the prison mail. After it arrives, he makes lists of the respective candidates’ priorities and compares them with his own. “As a voter, my job is to assess the best candidate for my values, my family’s values, and the values of the country,” he told me, after I visited G-Pod last summer. “I want to have a say in my own future.”

Bates is one of about a million and a half people who are currently serving prison terms in the United States. Only a tiny minority of those people are allowed to vote: in forty-eight states, voting from prison—which is legal in most of the European Union and in countries as disparate as Indonesia, South Africa, Canada, and Kenya—is either severely restricted or outlawed altogether. Alabama, Mississippi, and Alaska allow some people in prison to vote, depending on what crimes they have been convicted of. (Each state has a list of disqualifying crimes; a state representative in Mississippi has called his state’s list, which includes check-forging but not child molestation, “irrational.”) Only Maine and Vermont extend the franchise to all incarcerated citizens. In this sense, the northeastern corner of the U.S. is either a national outlier or a glimpse of what a different sort of democracy might look like.

I met Bates, who is fifty-two, on a warm afternoon in June, just outside the prison woodshop where he works for a fraction of the minimum wage. Bates, unlike most prisoners in Maine, is black, with a salt-and-pepper goatee. He is the president of the Maine State Prison chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., which has registered thousands of incarcerated voters over the years. He described voting as a small but resilient bond that he shares with the society that has sent him away. “When a person is incarcerated, the thing that remains is that he’s still a citizen,” Bates said. “We have to have something to go home for.”

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Bates is serving a life sentence for the rape and murder of a woman named Tammy Dickson, who was found strangled to death in South Portland, in 1994. He maintains his innocence, alleging racial bias from an all-white jury; he has appealed his conviction four times without success. (Maine outlawed parole in 1976.) Two women have come forward with testimony that could cast doubt on his conviction, but, in July, a judge said that a one-year deadline to present new evidence had passed.

Bates estimated that in 2008 the N.A.A.C.P. registered about three hundred voters in Maine State Prison, an unusually high number that he attributed to enthusiasm for Barack Obama. (The prison houses about nine hundred people.) But Republican candidates have a strong base of support within the prison, too, he said. He believes that it’s difficult to generalize about the political views of the incarcerated, and he isn’t convinced that political affiliations on the inside closely follow racial lines. Bates does not belong to a political party, but he hopes that a Democrat will “get the country back on track” after four years of President Trump. When we spoke, he was leaning toward Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris. Harris’s background as a prosecutor seemed not to bother him. “I like her strategy, I like her values,” he told me. He said he would consider voting for Joe Biden but worried that the former Vice-President wasn’t electable enough.

“I want to have a say in my own future.” Foster Bates, a resident of Maine State Prison

I had gone to see Bates after the voting rights of the incarcerated briefly and perhaps improbably became an issue in the 2020 Presidential race. In Iowa, last April, a volunteer for the A.C.L.U. had asked Bernie Sanders whether people in prison should be able to vote, and Sanders had said yes, unequivocally. He reiterated his position at a CNN town hall later that month. The Republican senator Lindsey Graham then seized on Sanders’s comments as a political opportunity: “Let’s vote on @BernieSanders idea to allow rapists, murderers, and terrorists to vote from prison,” Graham wrote on Twitter. “See where every elected official stands!” The other Democratic candidates were subsequently asked for their views. Four candidates who have since dropped out—O’Rourke, Castro, Booker, and Yang—said that some people should be allowed to vote from prison; Warren and Harris said that we should have “a conversation” about people voting in prison; Pete Buttigieg argued that disenfranchisement is a necessary part of incarceration. (All the candidates supported restoring voting rights for those who have completed their sentences.)

In the common area of G-Pod—where prison officials allowed me to conduct interviews on the condition that I omit the names of the people I met—I spoke to a white voter with a buzz cut and goatee. He told me that he usually preferred the Democrats but sometimes agreed with Republicans, and that he watched Fox News along with CNN and a local station. He estimated that a quarter of his fellow-prisoners vote. “There’s nothing holding you back,” he said. “It’s whether you want to.” Another man, who had immigrated to the U.S. from Somalia, in 2011, shared his disappointment that he wasn’t allowed to vote because he is not a U.S. citizen. “I wish I filled out my paperwork at the appropriate time, so I could express how I feel,” he said. Like Bates, he supported Kamala Harris. “I think we’re ready for a female President,” he said.

Just before I left the prison, a guard led me through an activity building, where I noticed a tall, bearded man sitting at a computer. When I asked about his views on voting from prison, he thought for a long moment and said, in a deep voice, “Yes. Prisoners should have the right to vote.” He pointed out that he is incarcerated with many educated men, and said that they could make good choices. But he had made a personal decision not to vote, he told me. “I’m not big on choosing between the lesser of two evils,” he said.

On an abstract level, the argument for restricting the voting rights of incarcerated citizens may seem straightforward. “If you’re not willing to follow the law yourself, then you shouldn’t have a right in making the law for everyone else,” Roger Clegg, the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative think tank in Virginia that also opposes bilingual education and affirmative action, told me recently. Incarceration prevents people from exercising many other basic rights, and while the Constitution outlaws disenfranchisement “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” it levies no penalty against states that disenfranchise citizens “for participation in rebellion, or other crime.” David Feldman, a law professor at Cambridge who has written about the voting rights of prisoners, told me that one could, of course, frame voting rights in terms of a social contract: citizens earn the franchise by following certain rules set by society and can lose the franchise if they commit specific crimes. This, however, is not the logic followed in the U.S., he noted: people are often disenfranchised according to the sentences they receive, rather than the crimes that they commit.

Feldman believes that only a few crimes, such as voter fraud or election tampering, ought to disqualify someone from voting. “A blanket ban is totally indiscriminate, and it’s both over-inclusive and under-inclusive,” he told me. “There are people in prison who really are not bad people, and happen to have been sentenced to prison not for any particularly serious offenses, but perhaps for a build-up of a whole lot of fairly minor offenses.” Other people who have committed crimes are never convicted or never face incarceration.