WINDSOR, Vt. - Liz Baker is a registered Republican who's concerned about education, health care and the preservation of Social Security.

A mother of three and former Girl Scout leader, she'll read the newspaper every day between now and November. She'll question the elected officials she meets, and she'll try to convince others in her community to register, explaining that every voice makes a difference.

This fall, Baker, 38, will mail her absentee ballot from the Southeast State Correctional Facility, a minimum security women's prison in southern Vermont's rolling farm country. She is serving four years for killing a man while driving drunk one summer morning two years ago.

"Being incarcerated is the most powerless feeling you could ever imagine, and seizing this one power, this one way of mattering, is huge," she says. "You have to grab on to it."

The man Baker killed was Bill MacLeay, 54, a history teacher and father of two who worked 17 years in local government and was running for the state Legislature when he died. His widow, Maggie MacLeay, doesn't think Baker should be allowed to vote while she's in prison. But once she has served her time, MacLeay believes her rights should be restored.

"If you truly believe that the reason we have a prison system is that we want to rehabilitate people, then if they can be released and live normal lives, why wouldn't you want that?" asks MacLeay, a 55-year-old nurse.

Maine and Vermont are the only states in the country that allow prisoners to vote. In Florida, felons are permanently disenfranchised unless they obtain clemency. Most states fall somewhere in between, restoring voting rights after inmates complete their sentences.

The question of whether ex-convicts should be free to shape society through the ballot box is at issue across the country. Since 1996, 11 states have changed their laws, eight of them making it easier for felons to vote after serving time.

Interviews with a half dozen inmates who plan to vote in Maine and Vermont suggest that prisoners' political concerns mirror those of other Americans. They include the war in Iraq, unemployment and the environment, along with criminal sentencing and corrections policy.

Rob Porter, 39 and serving 121/2 years for burglary at Maine State Prison in Warren, votes regularly and plans to do so this fall. He's against gay marriage and abortion, and says he looks for candidates who will help people in need.

On the outside he was an electrician, a trade he learned during an earlier prison stint. He would like to see more job training programs because, he says half-jokingly, "not everyone can go to prison to learn a trade like I did."

Drugs and crime have marred Porter's life, but he also has seen bright periods. In the small society of the prison, he is a mechanic who takes college classes, reads USA Today and Prison Legal News and belongs to the Long Timers Group, a nonprofit that donates to charities and tries to educate prisoners about the workings of the corrections system.

To deprive him of voting rights, he says, would take away his only means of public expression in a system that forces conformity. He understands that he did something wrong, but when he leaves prison, he wants a shot at respectability.

"If they take that away, I just feel they're putting out the fire," he says. "Even though the fire might be a good fire, they're still putting it out."

Another prisoner, 39-year-old Michael Lamore, said he'll vote to re-elect George W. Bush this year, though he disagrees with the president's economic policy and opposes the war in Iraq. Lamore, serving time for insurance and bank fraud at Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport, Vt., said he supports Bush's approach to the war on terror, including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the war in Afghanistan.

Across the blue-carpeted visiting room, 60-year-old Thomas Karov, doing 20 to 30 years for domestic assault and kidnapping, said he's not thrilled with John Kerry, but he won't vote for Bush.

"I don't think we should have our kids dying in Iraq," he says. "Who appointed us the moral guardians of the world? I don't get it."

In Maine, victims' advocates and Rep. Mary Black Andrews have challenged the state law. Andrews, whose state trooper husband was murdered in the line of duty 40 years ago, says there is strong support for stripping inmates' voting rights. Among the advocates is Debbie O'Brien, a member of Parents of Murdered Children whose 20-year-old son Devin was shot in the back of the head eight years ago by a man who offered him a ride home.

"It's frustrating to think that the killer of my son, who has probably another 17 years to go in prison, if he chooses to vote, has that right," O'Brien says. "That does not seem just or fair. I think when you commit murder you give up the right that any living person on this earth has."

Nevertheless, even Maine's official victim's advocate is against disenfranchisement, arguing that most prisoners eventually return to the community and shouldn't lose all their rights.

Jeffrey D. Merrill, the warden at Maine State, occasionally gets calls from people who don't want inmates to vote. He tells them that very few prisoners actually take advantage of the right. Of the 900 inmates at his prison, the largest and only maximum security facility in the state, Merrill and other officials estimate that between five and 60 will vote.

At Southeast State in Vermont, Assistant Superintendent Fran Drake plans to plaster the walls with posters about voting and work with the prison teacher and the Windsor town clerk to register inmates.

"It's part of our civics course down in the (prison) high school and it's just part of the curriculum that we educate people to vote and have a voice," Drake says.

Like other supporters of inmate voting rights, Drake believes the franchise is a step on the path to rehabilitation. About 100 women live at the prison, a former dairy farm with weathered barns and silos ringed by glittering razor wire. Their crimes range from writing bad checks to murder. They punch license plates and build furniture, grow organic vegetables in a sprawling hillside garden and care for a half dozen stray cats.

Halfway through her four-year sentence for killing Bill MacLeay while driving drunk, Liz Baker lives in Echo unit, a wood cabin set on a hillside above the rest of the prison. On her bedroom walls hang photos of her 5-year-old son celebrating his birthday at Ben and Jerry's, her 8-year-old daughter's first communion and her 10-year-old daughter jumping on a big bay horse. There's even a picture of the family's golden retriever, Twist.

She paid another inmate five packs of cigarettes to crochet a brightly colored blanket for the bed so she can tell her kids something nice about the place she now calls home.

Baker is a petite, neatly dressed woman with a firm handshake and a fleeting smile. Two years ago, she volunteered at her kids' schools and shuttled them to riding lessons and after school practice in a minivan. She and her husband, a wholesale beer and wine distributor, lived outside Burlington, a brisk college town on the banks of Lake Champlain.

The night before she killed MacLeay, Baker told a friend she had everything - she and her husband were getting along, the kids were happy, they had enough money. But since her son's birth, Baker had suffered from depression. Her doctor prescribed Paxil and Prozac, but in the hollows the medicine didn't reach, she started to drink.

It began with a bottle of red wine late in the afternoon, while she was making dinner for the kids or doing laundry. When there was no wine, she'd drive to the liquor store and buy 1-ounce bottles of Absolut vodka, small enough to hide in her pocket. At least once when she had been drinking, she drove to buy more liquor with her kids in the car.

In July 2002, Baker and her husband threw a party at her mother-in-law's cottage in nearby Colchester. The nanny took the kids and Baker got drunk.

The next morning, she treated her headache with two large screwdrivers and cleaned the house. She had to pick up the kids, so she took the nanny's car, a stick shift. She was used to an automatic.

She drove into town, past the street where Bill MacLeay lived, past the shop selling Vermont maple syrup and the Congregational church, past a stand of lupines and a stretch of woods. Coming down a hill, she realized she was going too fast. She headed for an open patch of grass on the other side of the road, crossing the center line and the opposite lane. She says she never saw Bill MacLeay, who was cycling downhill toward her.

MacLeay, a genial man with ruddy cheeks and a dry sense of humor, taught at a community college and worked on the Colchester planning commission and the town select board. For several years, he was chairman of the board, the equivalent of mayor.

He taught alternative students - farmers, loggers and housewives from Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. Maggie MacLeay likes to say the real Vermont is in those hills, in the cold, open fields and rural reaches of the northern country, where people drink their way through long winters and farmers will sell their souls to send their kids to school.

MacLeay had a gift for remembering names that helped him in politics. He hated campaigning, but he loved the tough work of government and could give a speech off the cuff. He got land turned over for public parks. He saved an old church and built a new town hall.

When he died, Mrs. MacLeay, a motherly woman with ginger hair and wire-rimmed glasses, went back to nursing cancer patients.

Mrs. MacLeay is glad Liz Baker is in prison. She says it wouldn't have been any different if someone had come into the house and stabbed her husband while he slept.

"Do I hate her with every fiber of my being? No. She did something bad. She's going to have to live with what she did every day, and I'm going to have to live with it. Neither one of us are winners. Both of us lost."

The real question, she says, is "How do you go on? How do you do something with your life from this?"

Liz Baker asks herself the same question.

When she learned MacLeay had died, she wanted to die too. But after speaking with a prison therapist, she decided that wasn't the answer.

MacLeay "was a really good guy and really involved, he really lived," she says. "I want to do as much as I can in the community to make up for it, so people won't suffer his loss so much."

Baker has become an activist in prison, though she never was before. She serves on committees. She writes to legislators. She always voted, but this year it's more important and more personal, partly because she is inspired by MacLeay's life and wants to carry on his work. She acknowledges that before, politics was a matter of distant budgets and choices that didn't seem to affect her much. Now, the state controls every aspect of her life. She's not sure whom she'll choose for president, but she's leaning toward Bush.

She says the past two years have made her a richer person, but that doesn't stop her from wishing they hadn't happened. Her kids visit twice a month, and the pain of seeing them takes her breath away. When they leave, she goes to her room and crawls into bed. She wants them to stop growing.

Part of her agrees with people who say criminals shouldn't be allowed to vote. But she thinks that people who can't change don't want to vote anyway, and wouldn't care if the right were taken away. In her case, she says, it's different. She believes she has something to contribute.

"I owe a great debt to society," she says. "and I've always paid my debts."

She often wonders what would have happened if MacLeay hadn't died. Would she have changed so radically?

Liz Baker doesn't know. All she knows is that now she has nothing to lose.