Well over 91 million people cast their ballots before Election Day this year. Tens of millions more are expected to vote today.

There are bitter debates about what rules should govern the voting process. Should “ballot harvesting” be legal? How about universal mail-in voting? Should IDs be required at polling places? One proposition no one openly disagrees with, though, is that human beings have a right to self-government — at least in the sense that every adult within a given jurisdiction should be able to vote for the political representatives who govern that jurisdiction.

Or, at least, that’s what most people would say if the question were posed to them in the abstract — and if they didn’t remember the surprisingly large categories of people that constitute exceptions to this rule, exceptions generally regarded as normal and acceptable in the contemporary United States.