Incarcerated Syracuse residents watch 2020 election unfold from behind bars
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AUBURN — The line to vote at Memorial City Hall in Auburn, a city in New York’s 24th Congressional District located 45 minutes southwest of Syracuse, had already formed by 6 a.m. Voter turnout remained steady throughout the day.
One mile away at Auburn Correctional Facility, inmates watched the 2020 election unfold through word-of-mouth, phone calls with family, varying amounts of cable news and articles they downloaded on state-issued tablets.
“This is the first time I would have ever voted. I don’t even think when Obama ran I would have voted,” said Cornell Flowers, an inmate from Syracuse who is in his 26th year of a 28-to-life sentence. “It’s because you can actually see the change. You can actually see how the country has changed.”
As the country watches results come in through televisions, inmates across New York state will gather the news from their cells. Inmates in state prisons across the country — with the exceptions of Maine and Vermont — are unable to vote. Their ability to follow the election depends not only on the facility, but also where they’re located within it.
Flowers is in Auburn Correctional Facility’s honor block, a cell area in which inmates can take longer phone calls, have increased access to cable news and spend more time outside their cells than the majority of people in general population cells.
The biggest reason Flowers would vote this year is because of President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. If the country had a leader who responded to the pandemic earlier, it wouldn’t be in the position it is today, he said.
Some inmates in general population cells follow along to election news on tablets, where they download articles from The Associated Press without pictures. Others catch glimpses of cable news during recreation time, when they often choose between a shower, phone call or workout. For months, recreation time was cut from three hours to one due to the pandemic.
Yaqin Abdullah, a former boxer from Syracuse who is also in Auburn Correctional Facility’s honor block, hasn’t voted before, either. Abdullah, who is Muslim, said his religious beliefs inform his political decisions, including giving to the poor.
“(Politicians) have some hidden agendas,” he said. “I personally think Biden is a better pick. Even though, like I said, I think all politicians have some things up their sleeve.”
As of Wednesday, Rep. John Katko (R-Camillus) was ahead of Dana Balter by 21 percentage points in the race for the 24th Congressional District, with only in-person ballots counted. Mail-in votes in New York state will not be counted until at least Nov. 9.
Central New York has aired more congressional television ads than anywhere else in the country, Syracuse.com reported. Many of those ads made it on the cable news programs that Flowers watches.
Katko and Balter exchanged attack ads throughout their campaigns. While he has little information on the congressional race outside of the ads, he noted one that called Balter “dangerous.” The ads made him curious about who Dana Balter is.
“When people say that stuff about Dana Balter, it makes me want to look into it further. Because people say something else behind what they’re doing,” he said. “You point your finger and three fingers point back at you.”
The United States Census Bureau once counted inmates in New York in the towns and prisons they’re located in. Upstate prisons raised the electoral weight of rural, predominantly white counties with prisoners who are disproportionately Black and Latino, according to the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative.
It also shifted representation upstate, with the census counting 43,740 prisoners from New York in the upstate New York towns where they were imprisoned.
New York state passed a measure in 2010 to count inmates in areas they’re originally from. That, among other factors, helped shape the current congressional map, which groups Auburn and Syracuse together in the same district. Nine states now count prisoners in the area where they resided before they were incarcerated, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, which spearheaded the legislation.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo also signed an executive order in 2018 that allows some parolees with felony records the right to vote, if pardoned by his office.
“Whoever is elected, we hope that they will pay attention to a lot of the criminal justice advocacy groups they are trying to bring to their attention,” said Cliff Graham, an inmate in the general population at Auburn.
Poll workers had arrived at Memorial City Hall by 5 a.m. and would stay after 9 p.m., when polls closed in New York. Jon Peterson, a poll worker, planned to go home, relax and try to stay awake until the votes were counted.
Flowers expects the results to take days to be determined.
“I’m gonna sit in front of the TV, probably make me a bowl of popcorn and see what happens,” he said.
