Yeah, I’m gonna say that there’s something really wrong with this picture but I just can’t put my finger on what….
Crystal Mason, a 43-year-old mother of two, finished serving a three-year sentence in 2016 for tax fraud, shortly before the presidential election. She was living under community supervision on Election Day, and authorities including her probation officer hadn’t told her that she was not legally allowed to vote.
“They tell you certain things like you can’t be around a felon, you can’t have a gun. No one actually said, ‘Hey, you can’t vote this year,'” Mason told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram when she was indicted earlier this month.
A judge in Tarrant County, Texas, would not be swayed by Mason’s explanation that when she arrived at her polling place, an election worker was helping her with a provisional ballot so she didn’t carefully read the fine print at the top. The print stated that former felons must complete their probation before they can vote in Texas.
The judge sentenced Mason to five years in prison for her transgression which is more than her original sentence for tax fraud.
And she’s not the only one.
Continued...
Mason is the second person in just over a year who has been sentenced to several years in prison over inadvertent illegal voting. Rosa Maria Ortega was given an eight-year sentence last year after she voted in 2012 and 2014, also in Tarrant County. She told a judge that she hadn’t realized she couldn’t vote as a legal permanent resident.
Here’s a bit more on the Ortega case from the NYTimes.
Despite repeated statements by Republican political leaders that American elections are rife with illegal voting, credible reports of fraud have been hard to find and convictions rarer still.
That may help explain the unusually heavy penalty imposed on Rosa Maria Ortega, 37, a permanent resident and a mother of four who lives outside Dallas. On Thursday, a Fort Worth judge sentenced her to eight years in prison — and almost certainly deportation later — after she voted illegally in elections in 2012 and 2014.
The sentence for Ms. Ortega, who was brought to this country by her mother as an infant, “shows how serious Texas is about keeping its elections secure,” Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, said in a statement. Her lawyer called it an egregious overreaction, made to score political points, against someone who wrongly believed she was eligible to vote.
More on this from Chris Hayes.
Mason is black, Ms. Ortega is clearly latino. The other common denominator here is also… Texas. And one could fairly say that Mason was on probation already so not giving her probation again rather than revoking it so that she would go back to jail to finish her original time makes sense, but that doesn’t work for Ortega, does it?
Just guess what happens when someone with a slight different complexion and likely political persuasion does — actually — something quite worse?
In North Carolina, a voter for President Donald Trump cast a ballot on behalf of her mother, who had just died. She claimed that she was grieving the death and didn’t know she couldn’t vote on behalf of a dead person. In that case, no charges were filed.
“This woman is 67 years old and has never run afoul of the law for anything more serious than a speeding ticket,” District Attorney David Learner said in a statement. “It is not in the public’s interest to charge her with this felony offense.”
In Colorado, the former Republican Party chair filled out his wife’s ballot for her and mailed it in. When she went to the polls, she was told she’d already voted, with no knowledge of it. He claimed he was having a “major diabetic episode” and had no memory of filling out the ballot.
In that case, he was given three years of probation and 300 hours of community service.
Another incident occurred in Iowa, Terri Lynn Rote tried to vote twice for Trump. Her excuse was that she believed Trump when he said the “election is rigged.” She feared her first vote would probably be changed to support Hillary Clinton, so she wanted to vote again.
In that case, she confessed to her guilt and was given probation with a $750 fine.
Mason and Ortega tried to cast their own ballots and both claimed they didn't know they had the wrong status at that time to do so. They were clearly in the wrong, but compare that with these other people who knowingly and willfully committed FRAUD — even forgery — to cast extra votes under the names of someone else.
These people obviously weren't in Texas or specifically in Tarrant County like Mason or Ortega.
They were also all white. And Republicans.
Clearly that was just coincidental, surely?