Crystal Mason: Texas woman sentenced to five years over voting error acquitted

Crystal Mason, who was convicted after a 2018 trial. Photograph: Ed Pilkington/The Guardian

A Texas appeals court has thrown out a five-year prison sentence for Crystal Mason, a Texas woman who was sentenced for trying to cast a provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential election that was rejected.

Mason, now 49, attempted to vote in Fort Worth in the 2016 even though she was ineligible because she was still on supervised release – which is like probation – for a tax felony. She has always maintained she had no idea she was ineligible and only tried to cast a ballot because her mother urged her to.

A judge convicted her in a 2018 trial that lasted just a few hours.

Mason’s case became well known nationally and struck a chord as an example of an egregious punishment for a voting mistake. Many saw it as a thinly veiled effort to intimidate Black voters.

In 2022, Texas’s highest criminal court told a lower appellate court it had to reconsider a ruling upholding Mason’s conviction. On Thursday, that court said there was not sufficient evidence Mason knew she was ineligible to vote.

Justice Wade Birdwell wrote for the court in its Thursday ruling: “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.”

Mason, who has remained out of prison on an appeal bond, said in a telephone interview on Thursday evening that she received the news while going through a drive-through and became emotional. “I was thrown into this fight for voting rights and will keep swinging to ensure no other citizen has to face what I’ve faced and endured for the past seven years, a political ploy where minority voting rights are under attack,” she added.

Although Mason was not particularly involved in politics before her case, she has since become much more engaged in raising awareness about voting rights. In 2022, she opened a rally for Beto O’Rourke.

A key piece of evidence in the case was testimony from the head poll worker, Mason’s neighbor, who assisted her with filling out the provisional ballot. Before submitting it, he said he went over an affidavit with her in which she had to affirm she was not serving a criminal sentence. The affidavit is poorly designed – it crams an admonition in both English and Spanish in relatively small print on one side, and requires the voter to fill out information on the other.

Mason signed the affidavit, but says she never understood that it meant she could not vote. The court on Thursday agreed there was not sufficient evidence to show she “actually realized” the affidavit meant she could not vote.

Alison Grinter Allen, one of her lawyers, said: “Crystal has gone through so much, and all of Texas owes her a great debt of gratitude. Through eight years, never once did she stop fighting, never once did she take her eyes off of the fact that this case was about every single voter in Texas.”

Despite her acquittal, the case has taken a significant toll on Mason and her family.

After Mason was arrested in 2017, she lost her job at a bank. She was also sent back to federal prison for several months for being arrested while on probation for a federal crime. During that time, she almost lost her home to foreclosure.

“Although I’ve cried for seven years straight, seven nights a week … I’ve also prayed for seven years straight, seven nights a week. Prayed that I would remain a free black woman,” she said in a statement.

“I am overjoyed to see my faith rewarded today.”