Editorial: The Big Lie — Is Crystal Mason proof of Texas election fraud — or of a political ploy?

Emblazoned with the scarlet letter “F,” we present Crystal Mason — 46, mother of three, grandmother of three, and ostensibly, voter fraud mastermind who served 11 months in prison after voting illegally in Tarrant County in 2016.

How did she pull off this most shameful of dastardly deeds? Did she conspire? Accept a bribe? Tamper with some elderly nursing home resident’s mail-in ballot?

No. She drove through the rain to vote at Baptist Tabernacle Church in Rendon, near Fort Worth. Her name wasn’t on the list. She says a poll worker suggested she cast something called a provisional ballot, which would count only if she was deemed eligible to vote. She carefully scrawled out all the required information from her ID card. She left and didn’t give it a second thought.

Until months later. With Donald Trump in the White House making claims that widespread voter fraud had cost him the popular vote, Mason found herself arrested and charged with voting illegally.

From the Editorial Board

In the end, her vote didn’t help Tarrant County go blue. In fact, her vote didn’t count at all. Mason was deemed ineligible because she was still on supervised release tied to a 2011 federal tax conviction. Mason and her then-husband had inflated tax refunds filed on behalf of clients. It was a terrible mistake, she says, and she paid the consequences: five years in prison.

“That was the hardest thing ever in my life, to be taken away from my kids,” Mason said in an interview. “So, I had a goal. I had a plan. I came out, I came out running. Show my kids that even though you hit a bump in the road, you can still get back on track.”

At the time of the 2016 election, she had completed her time in prison but had two more years left on federal supervised release. She maintains she didn’t know that she had to wait until that period was over before she could register to vote again in Texas.

The law didn’t care. She was convicted in a one-day bench trial of a second-degree felony. She was torn from her children and the life she was trying to rebuild.

She went from a confused voter to a useful prop in a carnival magic act, one in which the Texas GOP thrills its trembling audience by making the phantom of voter fraud appear out of thin air.

Except, Mason isn’t a side show act. She’s a person. With a family. With flaws, yes. But also with the right to make an honest mistake if that’s all it was. She’s currently on bond awaiting an appeal of her voter fraud conviction and lives in fear of going back to prison.

The Big Lie

An ongoing editorial series about Texas’ obsessive pursuit of voter fraud.

Today:

Voter fraud is exceedingly rare, despite fevered attempts to discover it … Opinion Page 1

The overzealous pursuit of fraud upends lives, even for a mistake … Opinion Page 2

Monday:

Texas has used voter fraud as a pretext for voter suppression for more than a century

Tuesday:

The Republican Party’s obsession with voter fraud dates from Al Gore’s popular vote victory in 2000

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“Think about waking up every day with your freedom on the line,” she said. “Imagine my mental state knowing it’s a possibility that I might leave my kids.”

The grand illusion of voter fraud may be entertaining at times, easy fodder for late-night comics and captivating to true-believing GOP voters, but it isn’t a victimless act. Although people are rarely prosecuted because voter fraud is nearly non-existent in this country, the Republican pursuit of it ensnares ordinary people, largely minorities, whose lives are interrupted if not upended, whose freedom may be deprived with a jail sentence, whose minor errors are depicted as subversive threats.

All this is happening for one reason: to justify harsh election restrictions targeting minority voters who tend to vote Democratic. Indeed, the American Civil Liberties Union estimates that Black and Latino voters, most of them women, have made up 72 percent of Attorney General Ken Paxton’s voter fraud prosecutions since 2015.

It’s part of a century-long scheme to preserve white conservative hegemony in state politics.

But do step right up, folks, and observe — not the reigning villain of Republican imaginations, but the victim of a cruel reality.

When Mason voted in 2016, she was recently out of prison, enrolled in beauty school and ready to take up her civic responsibility, which her mother had always taught her included voting.

“My mama, soon as the kids turn 18, she got the voter registration cards, she’s taking you to get your IDs and stuff,” Mason said. “She holds those cards like they’re gold.”

What Mason didn’t know and what no one told her, a probation official confirmed at trial, is that because she hadn’t finished supervised release, she wasn’t allowed to vote.

She was so sure that the judge would agree it was all just a big misunderstanding that she took her attorney’s advice and opted for a bench trial — with no jury, just a judge deciding her fate.

Turns out, though, Texas law doesn’t care whether a voter intended to deceive anyone. All prosecutors had to prove is that Mason knew two things simultaneously: that she was still under federal supervision and that she was casting a vote. Case closed.

On appeal, she argued that not only was she unaware of the rules but that the provisional ballot should have protected her from prosecution because it worked just as intended: allowing officials to check her vote and to toss it out when they deemed her ineligible. The courts disagreed, saying provisional ballots are only meant for eligible voters, to verify such things as whether the ballot was cast at the right place.

In upholding Mason’s conviction, the Fort Worth Court of Appeals acknowledged that “the evidence does not show that she voted for any fraudulent purpose,” but that her motive didn’t matter. “Not knowing the law is no excuse.”

While that may be the letter of the law, we can’t imagine it’s the spirit of the Texas election code, touted repeatedly by lawmakers as a weapon to root out actual fraud. Although far too often these efforts are aimed at individual voters rather than politicos who stand to gain the most from stealing an election.

In a cruel twist, Mason’s illegal voting conviction violated the terms of her federal supervised release and landed her back in jail for 10 more months even though she would have otherwise remained free during her state appeal.

“It’s this very kind of circular punishment, where she’s getting jail time on both sides,” says Thomas Buser-Clancy, a Texas attorney for the ACLU involved in the case. “She never should have been prosecuted.”

Mason’s provisional ballot was one of more than 67,000 cast in the 2016 Texas election, according to federal data. More than 50,000 of them were rejected, but Mason was the only one prosecuted.

In a hopeful development, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals recently agreed to review Mason’s case and will decide if she remains free or if she goes back to prison for five years.

It should be an easy decision.

Mason doesn’t belong back in prison any more than she belongs in a political sideshow. She should have checked her eligibility before she voted, but the system caught the mistake and protected the integrity of the election. By continuing to punish her so harshly, the state shines a light on its real motives: intimidating voters.

Fortunately, it didn’t work on Mason or her family. Her kids not only got fired up — they got involved, eventually as volunteers for Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 close-but-no-cigar U.S. Senate campaign.

“They were walking up and down the street, encouraging people to vote, telling people my story,” she says, noting that she’s been telling everyone that voting is the best way to thwart the election fraud trap.

“I’m walking on faith, and I’m trusting God,” she says. “I know that the right thing is going to be the outcome.”

That’s never a foregone conclusion in Texas. But if the good Lord and the folks on the Criminal Court of Appeals want to give justice a hand, we urge them to step right up.