Via the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, this story is outrageous — a judge sentenced a Texas woman to five years in prison for mistakenly attempting to cast a provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential election when she was ineligible to do so because she was still on supervised release from a 2011 felony fraud conviction:
A judge sentenced a Rendon woman to five years in prison Wednesday for voting illegally in the 2016 presidential election while she was on supervised release from a 2011 fraud conviction.
Crystal Mason, 43, waived her right to a jury trial and chose to have state District Judge Ruben Gonzalez assess her sentence.
J. Warren St. John, her defense attorney, said after the verdict that an appeal had already been filed and that he is hopeful his client will soon be released on bond.
Mason testified that she did not realize that she was not allowed to vote, and would never have jeopardized the opportunity to see her children graduate from school just to cast a ballot in an election.
During her testimony, Mason — who served just shy of three years in federal prison — told the court that she was assigned a provisional ballot after she arrived at her usual polling place and discovered that her name was not on the voter roll.
Gonzalez, who questioned Mason during her testimony, asked why she did not thoroughly read the documents she was given at the time.
The form you are required to sign to get the provisional ballot is called an affidavit, Gonzales told Mason. “There’s a legal connotation to that, right?” Gonzales asked.
Mason responded that she was never told by the federal court, her supervision officer, the election workers or U.S. District Judge John McBryde, the sentencing judge in her fraud case, that she would not be able to vote in elections until she finished serving her sentence, supervised release included. She also said she did not carefully read the form because an election official was helping her.
More than 6 million felons in the United States are denied the right to vote.