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There's a captive audience of unregistered, mostly undecided, potential voters whom candidates have paid almost no attention to.

Maybe the bars scare off the campaign workers.

As Monday's voter registration deadline nears, volunteers at Just Harvest are working to register inmates at the Allegheny County Jail. An unprecedented survey of inmates by the Pittsburgh-based charity found 336 inmates who are eligible to vote and want to cast absentee ballots in the Nov. 2 election. Of those, 196 had to register to vote.

Just Harvest, which supports anti-poverty programs, put together the jail project as part of its overall voter registration drive this year, called Just Vote. The group registered about 1,100 new voters, mostly at shelters, Head Start centers and food pantries.

"There is a fair amount of misinformation telling us that people in jail can't vote, which is not necessarily true," said Chip Peters, voter registration field organizer for Just Harvest. "The only people in jail who can't vote are felons. If you are in jail awaiting trial, or serving a misdemeanor sentence such as criminal trespass, or doing 30 days because you couldn't pay a fine for, say, drunk and disorderly, you are still allowed to vote."

Inmate registration programs began appearing across the nation in the past year or two, said Charlie Sullivan, co-director of Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants, a Washington, D.C.-based prison advocacy group. However, Bill Schouppe, warden of the Beaver County Jail, said he hasn't seen any such efforts at his lockup.

Peters said Just Harvest is a nonpartisan organization and has no interest in promoting any parties or candidates. Wilfred Rojas, director of the office of community justice and outreach in the Philadelphia prison system, said he's found most inmates are among the undecided voters so coveted in this presidential election.

"They haven't really been engaged in the political system," said Rojas, who heads a voter registration effort that the jail began in June after a Philadelphia group similar to Just Harvest started registering inmates. So far, the jail has registered 900 inmates. Eventually, Rojas said, inmates will be able to register to vote when they're processed into the jail.

"There is some evidence that it has a rehabilitative effect to keep people in jail connected to the community by such things as voting," Peters said. "You want them to do the right things. Obviously, some of them jumped the tracks somewhere. This is an opportunity for them to do what we as a society tell them they should be doing -- getting out and exercising their right to vote."

The county jail has about 2,400 inmates, and officials there "predicted maybe 50 people" would register to vote, Peters said.

After the questionnaire prepared by Just Harvest was distributed, the response surprised Jack Pischke, inmate program administrator at the jail, who has worked at the facility 21 years.

"It was overwhelming," he said.

Those who do register and are in jail on Election Day will have to vote by absentee ballot. For that, the county Elections Division will send poll workers to distribute the ballots, wait until prisoners fill them out and collect them, said Mark Wolosik, who heads the division.

"They're going to have their own little Election Day in the jail," Peters said.

Pischke said he has no idea how the inmates might be leaning in the presidential race, although one inmate wrote "Go Bush" on his questionnaire.

Inmates aren't the only ones registering to vote. Through mid-September, about 40,000 new voters registered in the county this year, including 21,859 Democrats, 9,369 Republicans and about 9,000 independents or members of other parties, said Wolosik. Voter rolls normally swell in presidential election years, he said.

"I believe registration is high everywhere, not just Allegheny County," Wolosik said.

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