‘Overwhelmed with joy’: Crystal Mason celebrates overturned illegal voting conviction
“I cried and hollered when I got the news,” Tarrant County resident Crystal Mason told reporters Friday morning, less than 24 hours after a Texas state appeals court overturned her conviction and five-year prison sentence for illegal voting.
The yearslong legal battle over one uncounted provisional ballot appeared to draw to a close Thursday evening with Mason’s acquittal. Her case garnered international attention and embodied a fraught national dialogue on electoral rights.
“Ms. Mason never should’ve been prosecuted for what was, at worst, an innocent misunderstanding,” Thomas Buser-Clancy, senior staff attorney for the Texas ACLU, said in a news conference Friday on Zoom. “The result is a victory for democracy.”
Mason cast a provisional vote in the 2016 election while on a three-year supervised release related to a 2012 tax fraud conviction. Would-be voters uncertain about their eligibility can file provisional ballots instead of casting a regular ballot, leaving it to election officials to tally or toss the vote (Mason’s vote wasn’t counted).
Two years later, a state district judge found Mason guilty of voting illegally, sentencing her to five years in prison. Texas law forbids residents with felony judgments from voting until they’ve “finished the full terms of their sentence.” Mason and her attorneys argued that she had no knowledge of the rule and, as such, shouldn’t be held liable for violating it.
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Some Republicans at the time paraded Mason’s vote as an concrete example of largely unsubstantiated claims about widespread voter fraud. Voter rights advocates rallied in support of Mason.
“Crystal Mason was targeted as part of a broader voter suppression strategy in Texas,” Christina Beeler, a senior staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, said during the Friday press conference. “Texas has a long history of voter suppression, and Ms. Mason’s case is sadly just the latest example of the lengths to which the state is willing to go to try to discourage people from voting.”
The Court of Appeals for the Second District of Texas had initially upheld Mason’s original conviction. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the next highest judicial authority, undid the ruling, determining that prosecutors had to establish beyond reasonable doubt that Mason had known she’d been voting illegally in order to be convicted of it. The Second Court of Appeals, upon revisiting the case, found the state’s arguments fell short.
“We conclude that the quantum of the evidence presented in this case is insufficient to support the conclusion that Mason actually realized that she voted knowing that she was ineligible to do so and, therefore, insufficient to support her conviction for illegal voting,” Justice Wade Birdwell reasoned in his judgment.
Prosecutors can request that the Court of Criminal Appeals review the case, but Mason’s team is hopeful the judgment will stand.
“Know your rights,” Mason advised. “Don’t let my story discourage you, but encourage you to go to the polls.”
“I was thrown into this fight for voting rights and will keep swinging to ensure no one else has to face what I’ve endured for over six years, a political ploy where minority voting rights are under attack,” Mason said in an ACLU news release. “I’ve cried and prayed every night for over six years straight that I would remain a free Black woman. I thank everyone whose dedication and support carried me through this time and look forward to celebrating this moment with my family and friends.”
