A Texas appeals court has overturned a Fort Worth woman’s voter fraud conviction and five-year prison term for casting an illegal provisional ballot.
Crystal Mason did not know that being on probation for a previous felony conviction left her ineligible to vote in 2016, the Second District Court of Appeals in Fort Worth ruled on Thursday.
Prosecutors maintained that Mason read and signed an affidavit accompanying the provisional ballot affirming that she had “fully completed” her sentence if convicted of a felony.
Justice Wade Birdwell wrote that having read these words on the affidavit didn't prove Mason knowingly cast the provisional ballot illegally.
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"Even if she had read them, they are not sufficient … to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she actually knew that being on supervised release after having served her entire federal sentence of incarceration made her ineligible to vote by casting a provisional ballot.”
CRYSTAL MASON
Mason, a former tax preparer, had been convicted in 2012 on charges related to inflating refunds for clients and served nearly three years of a five-year sentence in prison. Then she was placed on a three-year term of supervised release and had to pay $4.2 million in restitution, according to court documents.
In a virtual press conference on Friday, Mason's attorneys in the voting rights case said she served 10 months in jail for the case.
"It's been a rough journey," Mason said. "It's real rough to go back to somewhere you said that you'll never go back to, to leave your kids. I lost jobs, lost good jobs, lost insurance."
Mason's provisional ballot was never counted.
"The system worked like it should in the sense that they told her that if she was eligible to vote, the provisional ballot would be submitted and counted and if not, it wouldn't. And then they checked it on the backend and determined that she was not eligible and therefore it wasn't counted," explained Thomas Buser-Clancy, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Texas.
Buser-Clancy said that should have been the end of the journey, but it wasn't-- the state pursued charges and landed a successful conviction against Mason in 2018.
Mason’s long sentence made both state Republican and Democratic lawmakers uneasy. In 2021, after passing a new voting law measure over Democrats’ objections, the GOP-controlled state House approved a resolution stating that “a person should not be criminally incarcerated for making an innocent mistake.”
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals previously ordered the court to review whether there was sufficient evidence to convict Mason, ruling that Texas election law requires that individuals know they are ineligible to vote to be convicted of illegal voting.
“I cried and hollered when I got the news," Mason said on Friday.
Kim Cole, an attorney for Mason, called the prosecution malicious and politically motivated.
“The state’s prosecution specifically stated that they wanted to ‘send a message’ to voters. They deliberately put Crystal through over six years of pure hell," Cole said in the statement.
Mason's team also said that the case was a form of voter suppression. They said the laws surrounding when someone becomes ineligible to vote after jail time vary by state and are unclear and confusing even for election officials.
"When prosecutors arrest and jail people for trying to vote in good faith amidst all this confusion and misinformation, like in Ms. Mason's case, it stokes a very real fear of voting," said Casey Smith of the ACLU Voting Rights Project.
Mason said it hasn't deterred her from going back to the ballot box, and she plans to keep encouraging others to do so, as well, through her new organization.
“Know your rights. If you're eligible to vote, please vote," she said.
Her team acknowledged that the state may still choose to seek a review of reversal by the court of criminal appeals, but they hope that doesn't happen, and that this chapter of Mason's journey is behind her.
"I trusted God this whole journey. So I do know that it was only one set of footsteps because he was carrying me all the way through," she said with tears on Friday.
NBC 5 reached out to the Office of the Attorney General for comment, and to ask if Ken Paxton's team plans to seek an appeal. We will update this story once we hear back.
