E-Mail This Article to a Friend ELECTIONS Prisoners can’t vote — can they? BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

Next Tuesday, Massachusetts citizens will vote in the Democratic primary, as well as in the special election to replace Cheryl Jacques as state senator for the Norfolk, Bristol, and Middlesex District. Thanks to the last successful state-constitutional amendment, we know one thing for certain: incarcerated felons won’t participate.

Actually, we don’t know that at all. It turns out that they may still be voting by absentee ballot; the state has no idea.

"No one would ever know," says Teresa Neighbor, director of the Cambridge Election Commission. "They made a law but never told anybody how to enact it."

Voters passed the constitutional amendment in 2000 by a nearly two-to-one margin. It bars anyone "incarcerated in a correctional facility due to a felony conviction" from voting.

All but two states have similar bans. Most remove names of ineligible felons from the voter rolls — either at the time of conviction (as New Jersey does through notification by the prosecutor) or prior to elections (as Florida does by comparing registration lists against felon databases).

Massachusetts does not remove felons from its voter rolls at all — because no law says to do so, says Brian McNiff, spokesperson for Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin. The only way to prevent incarcerated felons from voting — whether in deliberate fraud or in ignorance of their ineligibility — is for town registrars to investigate "suspicious" requests for absentee ballots. Suspicious, he says, would mean that the request comes postmarked from prison.

What if a prisoner’s spouse or other family member sends the request from home, and brings the ballot to the prisoner? "No one would ever know," Neighbor says. "Unless the address to mail to is a prison, we would have no clue." Cambridge has mailed about 500 absentee ballots for next week’s election; for some elections, that number runs as high as 3000, out of the city’s 40,000 registered voters. Any of these absentee ballots could potentially have gone to incarcerated felons, Neighbor concedes. And once such a ballot is sent, there is no further opportunity to screen the recipient’s eligibility.

Even if an absentee-ballot request does come from a prison, there’s a good chance the ballot will end up being sent. The town can’t assume the prisoner is ineligible to vote — MCI-Concord, for instance, holds men with felony convictions, men with misdemeanors, and others still awaiting trial. Only the first group is barred from voting.

To determine whether to send a ballot, McNiff says, the town registrar must send a police officer to investigate. That comes as news to election officials in Boston, Cambridge, and Springfield — the last-known cities of residence for more than a third of the state’s 10,000 prisoners — who all said they had no idea how to screen requests from incarcerated felons. "To be honest, I would have to check with the secretary of state," says Kathy Hoar Fleury, secretary of the Springfield Election Commission.