In 2018, Crystal Mason was convicted of illegally voting while on probation for a previous conviction. Mason voted in the 2016 election and said she did not know that a provision of her former conviction was that she could not do so. Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney Sharen Wilson did not care, and Mason was facing five years in state prison.
This week, she received the news that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agreed to hear her case, The Texas Tribune reported. Mason previously appealed the ruling in March 2020 and lost her appeal. At the time, Judge Wade Birdwell, one of three judges on the panel, asserted that the woman’s lack of knowledge of the rules was not enough to overturn her conviction.
Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, Mason claimed that it was unclear that she was ineligible to vote. Even her probation officer admitted in court that he failed to tell Mason that her voting rights were suspended. Still, the panel upheld the ruling of the trial court, saying, “The State needed only to prove that she voted while knowing of the existence of the condition that made her ineligible.”
In November, Mason’s attorneys filed another appeal and requested that her case be reviewed, her previous conviction be reversed and acquittal of the illegal voting charge. They argued that the lower court’s finding violated the Federal Help America Vote Act.
Surprisingly, the all-Republican court agreed to review the case. The court said it will review the case without hearing oral arguments and will rely on legal briefs. District Attorney Willson’s office responded to Mason’s latest petition telling the court she would not file a formal reply and submitted the same response from the previous appeal. They asserted that Mason’s case does not meet HAVA guidelines.
This appeal comes at a time when politicians casually ramped up voter suppression efforts nationwide in response to the high minority voter turnout that ejected Donald Trump from the White House. The racial dog-whistling of these types of laws is obvious.
The vote that Mason cast was never counted.
