Texas woman sentenced to 5 years in prison for voting while on probation
Crystal Mason said she had no idea she wasn't allowed to vote. “You think I would jeopardize my freedom?" she said according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "Who would — as a mother, as a provider — leave their kids over voting?”
BY MEAGAN FLYNN, THE WASHINGTON POST MARCH 30, 2018
If she had known it was illegal, Crystal Mason said she would have never cast a vote in the 2016 presidential election.
The 43-year-old former tax preparer hadn’t even planned on voting until her mother encouraged her to do it. She had only recently been released from federal prison for a 2012 tax fraud conviction, in which she pleaded guilty to inflating returns for her clients, her attorney, J. Warren St. John, told The Washington Post.
She was still on community supervision at the time of the election — but no one, including her probation officer, St. John said, ever told her that being a felon on supervision meant she couldn’t vote under Texas law.
Now, she’s going back to prison for casting a ballot illegally — for five years.
Well that's just cruel. Seems TX has found two whole cases of their "rampant" voter fraud. They've been pushing for strong sentences for those who make mistakes, such as Ms. Mason, or, Ms. Ortega, also in the article below. I realize the "ignorance of the law" argument, but the sentencing, for both cases, is just far too harsh, and shows no compassion.
From the link below:
Mason was indicted on a charge of illegal voting in Tarrant County, Tex., last year and found guilty by State District Judge Ruben Gonzalez... (He's a tough character.)
The case is yet another illustration of Texas’s zealous crackdown on voter fraud, a problem that state GOP leaders have
described as “rampant” in the past but for which they have yet to provide hard proof, save for isolated cases such as Mason’s.
In February 2017, another woman in Tarrant County, a Mexican national with a green card, was sentenced to eight years in prison after falsely claiming to be a U.S. citizen on her ballot.
According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Rosa Maria Ortega, a mother of four, testified that she had confused the difference between rights granted to legal permanent resident and to a U.S. citizen, which a jury did not buy. She had voted as a Republican in elections in 2012 and 2014.
On the day of the presidential election, Nov 8., 2016, Mason arrived at her polling place to find that her name wasn’t on the voter roll, St. John said.
An election worker offered to help, he said, and presented her with a provisional ballot, which allows a person to cast a vote as long as they certify they are eligible by signing an affidavit. Small print at the top asks the voter to certify that if she is a felon, she has fully completed her sentence, including supervision or parole of any kind. Mason tried to explain to the judge that, since an election worker was helping her, she was not reading carefully, which, St. John said, failed to sway him.
https://www.texastribune.org/2018/03/30/texas-woman-sentenced-5-years-prison-voting-while-probation/
