On Monday night, CNN hosted a marathon speed-dating series of town halls for Democratic presidential contenders. Toward the tail end, Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and the first openly gay man to run for president came out against the right for people to vote while incarcerated.

Earlier in the night, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders repeated a point he made earlier this month, that the rest of the country should follow Vermont and Maine's lead and allow people to vote even while they're incarcerated. When Anderson Cooper asked about his stance, Buttigieg gave a quick, "no." He elaborated: "Part of the punishment when you are convicted of a crime and you're incarcerated is you lose certain rights. You lose your freedom. And I think during that period it does not make sense to have an exception for the right to vote."

He did grant that ex-felons should be able to vote once released from prison.

I do believe that...when you have served your sentence, then part of being restored to society is that you are part of the political life of this nation again. And one of the things that needs to be restored is your right to vote. As you know, some states and communities do it, some don't. I think we'd be a better country if everybody did it. Frankly, I think the motivations for preventing that kind of reenfranchisement, in some cases, have to do with one side of the aisle noticing that they politically benefit from that. And that's got some racial layers too.

Buttigieg's reasoning—that prisoners lose their rights while in prison and that they're "removed from political life"—is circular. As Vann Newkirk wrote in The Atlantic last year, it's the same as saying a prisoner can't vote because they're a prisoner. "Even death-row inmates retain a broad array of constitutional rights," Newkirk says, "including access to due process, the right to sue, and the right to appeal. Why is the right to vote excluded?"

The answer is tied to the history of felon disenfranchisement, which was a post-Civil War push by states to keep newly freed former slaves from voting. Prisoners are not, as Buttigieg maintains, kept out of the "political life of this nation," they're kept from having any say in it. They're deeply bound up in political decisions that they have no way to influence, like cuts to prison education programs and 15-minute phone calls costing as much as $22.