A 43-year-old African-American woman was sentenced to five years in prison Wednesday for casting an illegal vote in 2016. This tragically wrong story is brought to us by Texas lawmakers, who have passed some of the nation's most punishing voter fraud laws despite having provided no proof that it’s a widespread and serious problem. Instead they are clinging to individual cases like that of Crystal Mason, who had just finished serving nearly three years in federal prison for tax evasion and was on community supervision when she unwittingly violated her probation by casting a vote in the 2016 election. Her lawyer, J. Warren St. John, said she had no idea she was committing a crime.
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. [...]
As she told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram at the time she was indicted: “You think I would jeopardize my freedom? You honestly think I would ever want to leave my babies again? That was the hardest thing in my life to deal with. Who would — as a mother, as a provider — leave their kids over voting?” [...]
“She voted in good faith. She showed who she was. Everything was truthful,” St. John said.
St. John has already appealed the ruling, but it's not the first time a Texas judge has gone ballistic over what could understandably be an honest mistake.
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.
In both cases, these women claimed they were confused and conceivably could have been confused about their legal rights and restrictions. But they were shown neither compassion nor the benefit of the doubt by judge and jury.
And then there was the case of a woman in Catawba County, North Carolina, who also claimed she didn't know what she was doing when she cast two votes for Donald Trump—one for herself and one for her mother, a fervent Trump supporter who had recently passed away. That state prosecutor decided not to bring charges last year.
District Attorney David Learner, chief prosecutor for Catawba, Burke and Caldwell counties, announced his decision Wednesday not to pursue the case, which had been referred to him by the State Board of Elections.
Learner, a Republican, withheld the name of the voter but said she had cast the improper vote for Trump last November “out of sheer ignorance” of the law and while “grieving the loss of her mother.”
“This woman is 67 years old and has never run afoul of the law for anything more serious than a speeding ticket,” Learner said in a statement. “It is not in the public’s interest to charge her with this felony offense.”
Right. She voted for her dead mother. As Daily Kos alum Josie Duffy Rice noted: "Funny how sometimes ignorance is a defense."
Just to be clear, in-person voter fraud has been shown to be extremely rare.
In a 2016 ruling rejecting Texas’s stringent voter ID law, which state lawmakers had pitched as a way to stop voter fraud, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit found only two convictions for in-person voter fraud out of 20 million ballots cast in the years before the 2011 passage of the law.
But Loose Lips Trump hasn't let the facts get in the way of his repeated claims that millions of illegal votes were cast for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election. Now, it appears that the few cases of voter fraud that do exist are exacting very different penalties, with at least one Trump voter getting off scot-free.
And in Texas, the law appears to be having the intended effect of suppressing certain votes. That's the case for Crystal Mason.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that a “chorus of small children” waved goodbye to her as a bailiff led her back to jail, saying, “Bye-bye, Big Mama.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever vote again,” she told the news outlet after her indictment. “That’s being honest. I’ll never vote again.”