‘I refuse to be afraid.’ Appeal filed in Tarrant County woman’s illegal voting conviction
The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas filed a petition Monday to appeal the five-year sentence of a woman who was convicted of voter fraud in Tarrant County.
The ACLU and other legal representatives requested that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals review the case of Crystal Mason, whose illegal voting conviction in Tarrant County has become widely controversial.
Three justices on the Court of Appeals for the Second District of Texas denied Mason’s first appeal in March, although the court agreed she did not know she was ineligible to vote.
Now the ACLU will try to take the case — which ACLU legal director Andre Segura called, “one of the most important voting rights cases in modern Texas history” — through the next appeals process.
In the 2016 election, Mason submitted a provisional ballot, later saying she was not aware she could not vote while on federally supervised release. Her ballot was not counted — provisional ballots are meant to allow a voter to cast a potential ballot even if their name does not appear on the list of registered voters. The ballot is examined later for validity.
Nearly 4,500 other people submitted provisional ballots in Tarrant County in the 2016 election. Of those, 3,990 provisional ballots were rejected, the Texas Tribune reported.
But in March 2018, Mason was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison for illegal voting. And while she appealed her case last year, the Second District Appeals Court upheld her conviction after a hearing in Tarrant County in September 2019.
“The fact that she did not know she was legally ineligible to vote was irrelevant to her prosecution,” Justice Wade Birdwell wrote in the court’s opinion. “The State needed only to prove that she voted while knowing of the existence of the condition that made her ineligible.”
But Mason’s attorneys say Texas convicted her to make an example of her and intimidate other minorities into not voting.
“I’m more energized than ever before and I refuse to be afraid,” Mason, a Black woman from Rendon, said in an ACLU press release. “I thought I was performing my civic duty and followed the election process by filling out a provisional ballot. By trying to criminalize my actions, Texas has shown me the power of my voice. I will use my voice to educate and empower others who are fighting for their right to vote.”
Her attorneys also say the lower court’s opinion violates Texas law, citing DeLay v. State, a case involving former Republican U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay. In DeLay’s case, the Court of Criminal Appeals threw out his conviction on the basis that a person must actually “know” that their conduct violates the Election Code.
Mason’s team has also argued her case is an example of voter suppression in Texas and in the U.S. Her legal team consists of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, the ACLU Voting Rights Project, the Texas Civil Rights Project and Mason’s personal attorneys, Kim Cole and Alison Grinter.
This story was originally published November 30, 2020 at 9:59 PM.
