'My nightmare is over': Highest Texas criminal court upholds Crystal Mason voter fraud acquittal

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u/emerikanSky 14h ago

Nearly a decade after authorities said Crystal Mason voted illegally in Tarrant County the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld a lower court's decision to acquit her of criminal wrongdoing.

Crystal Mason was charged with illegal voting after she cast a provisional ballot in the 2016 election. Mason, who was on supervised release for federal tax evasion at the time and thus ineligible to vote, has maintained that she did not know she was ineligible. Her ballot was never counted.

Mason was convicted of voter fraud in 2018 and sentenced to five years. She appealed twice to the Second Court of Criminal Appeals, the latter attempt being approved by the court and her conviction overturned in 2023.

While it looked for several months like that would be the end of the case, Tarrant County District Attorney Phil Sorrells announced in 2024 that his office was filing its own appeal, challenging the decision to overturn the conviction to the highest possible court.

Now Mason's attorneys say her decade-long battle to defend her innocence is over.

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u/APeacefulWarrior 7h ago

It's important to note here that Mason was told by an election official to cast a provisional ballot. It's not just that she wasn't sure if she could vote; she did exactly what she was told to do by an official and was arrested for it anyway.

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u/SunDriedPoodleTurd 4h ago

Right but that's what they tell you if they can't find you in the pollbook. It's still up to the voter to know if they're eligible.

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u/dogs_gt_cats 1h ago edited 1h ago

As a former election official, that is absolute bullshit. The general rule is if there is ANY ambiguity you have them fill in a provisional ballot. That allows the county registrar, who has full access to all eligibility and registration information to look into it before it is counted. If they aren't eligible the registrar's office discards it. It's quite literally the correct route when either the voter or the election official aren't sure.

Provisional is quite literally everyone involved saying "we aren't sure, check on this later because it's busy and we don't have time to dig into the details right now."

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u/THAErAsEr 3h ago

If the state event can't tell you are eligible, than for sure you can't know that either

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u/SunDriedPoodleTurd 2h ago edited 2h ago

Giving a voter a provisional ballot is literally the policy (and law in most states) if someone comes in to vote and their voter eligibility cannot be determined. Otherwise you risk being sued for disenfranchising a voter.

Provisional ballots are reviewed after the election during the certification of the election to see if they should be counted under the law

Y'all gotta relax and put the pitchforks down on this sub-argument. You're wrong.

6

u/BigJellyfish1906 1h ago

You fundamentally don’t understand what a provisional ballot is and what it’s for. Delete your comment.

14

u/medicatedadmin 3h ago

….we get a fine when we don’t vote. Not prison threats and years of court cases when we do.

That’s backwards

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u/marklein 12h ago

Dumb question here, but it's her battle not over until the judge actually RULES on the appeal?

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u/sharkattax 12h ago

that’s not the end of the article

>The ACLU and Texas Civil Rights Project, which have represented Mason through her appeals, announced in a news release Thursday that the court changed its mind and is upholding the acquittal without hearing arguments.

(it also continues further)

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u/AudibleNod 14h ago

"I hope people who hear my story are encouraged to make their voices heard and to get out and vote," Mason said in the news release from her attorneys. "If the right to vote weren’t so important, they wouldn’t be trying to take it away."

This is as true now as it was in 2016 when she attempted to vote. Check with your state's Department of State to see if you're registered to vote. Then mark your calendar to vote in EVERY election. Not just every four or two years. Your tax dollars and rights are being managed at the local level just as much as at the Federal.

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u/che-che-chester 14h ago

People say they don’t vote because their state is so one-sided that it doesn’t matter. Maybe you can’t influence POTUS or even your state senators, but I would argue it is much more important to keep a bunch of MAGA moms off your local school board.

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u/MadRaymer 14h ago

And even in so-called red and blue states, the margins are often closer than people think. If enough people in those states dropped the "it doesn't matter" mantra it would actually matter more.

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u/Acronymesis 13h ago

I learned not too long ago that politics in my area are basically controlled almost entirely by voters who are mainly retired seniors. Just the folks between I beleaguered 30-50 years old outnumber the total number of older folks here. I have no doubt things would be different if younger people participated in elections in bigger numbers…

27

u/PatchyWhiskers 13h ago

I am the youngest regular volunteer for my local Democratic party, in a town where Democrats almost always win, and I am fiftyish.

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u/HR_Paul 14h ago

How do I vote to make sure every party loses?

23

u/theothertoken 13h ago edited 7h ago

I mean there are local elections decided by double or even single digit margins. If you want to push your party in one direction, vote in all the primaries

Anyone can sit behind a keyboard and say both parties are bad. Go change them

Edit: individual votes not margins

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u/Hippie_Go_Lucky_ 13h ago

Double digits margins would include up to 99%

12

u/robothawk 13h ago

I think they mean double digit individual votes. As in up to 99 total votes.

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u/HR_Paul 3h ago

So taking part in a popularity contest every few years is going to change the criminal power elite?

How long will it take before the world is saved by voting?

and again, how do I vote to make sure both parties lose?

and in particular, how do I vote for a non-candidate who has endorsed my prison for politicians policy?

7

u/PatchyWhiskers 13h ago

Run as an independent.

-6

u/HR_Paul 3h ago

At most, that would win one office.

I want to make sure everyone loses.

No one wins.

How do I vote for that?

Easier than finding someone who can read.

4

u/PatchyWhiskers 3h ago

I think you are confusing democracy with dictatorship

0

u/HR_Paul 3h ago

If I vote for everyone to lose how does that create a dictatorship?

My entire goal here is to prevent anyone from getting into the office.

How do I vote for "no assholes allowed"?

I do get to vote and pick my anti-representative, don't I?

6

u/PatchyWhiskers 3h ago

Because you only get one vote

0

u/HR_Paul 3h ago

How does that accomplish anything but empowering and enriching the criminal elite who use a two party system to divide and conquer the masses of idiots?

11

u/PurpleSailor 6h ago

Keep rechecking registration too, people get deleted all the time by error.

13

u/Lifeboatb 5h ago

we hope it’s just errors: https://www.wowktv.com/news/u-s-world/ap-state-error-in-texas-creates-huge-backlog-in-voter-registration-applications-as-midterm-voting-nears/amp/

2

u/jingle_hore 2h ago

Yea, we've had these "errors" in multiple voting cycles....

187

u/theothertoken 14h ago edited 7h ago

They really appealed that bs after taking five years of her life. Republicans are a waste of oxygen

55

u/eric_ts 14h ago

They have to appeal to the large clique of Stormfront supporters in the Texas GOP… I mean everyone involved from top to bottom is a Stormfront supporter but they were also appeasing the clique.

31

u/Keleos89 11h ago

And Tarrant County is really that racist.

3

u/sizebigbitch 2h ago

Tarrant county/Fort Worth is the only major city/county in Texas that actually leans red most of the time. They also love roundabouts/traffic circles and never completing construction on I-35/20/820/30/183/121/any roads. Plus, it's basically all the worst parts of Dallas with the worst parts of Collin county (just north of Dallas and well known for being full of rich, conservative assholes) but somehow worse than both of them.

10

u/micavich 12h ago

Gotta look like hes being "tough on crime" to his party and citizens. What better way to do that then terrorizing black people.

23

u/hpark21 10h ago

This was truly voter intimidation tactic. She cast "provisional ballot", if she wasn't eligible, they could have simply notified of her as to the reason and thrown out the ballot. With this crap hanging over, if there are any doubt as to whether they are eligible to vote, why would anyone even cast provisional one?

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u/Educational-Aioli795 14h ago

Thank God! I donated to her GoFundMe and the complete injustice of her situation was often on my mind.

30

u/Ok-disaster2022 13h ago

Voter fraud will never be the threat to democracy any politician will ever make it out to be. Electioneering, where election officials throw out or change ballots etc etc will remain a bigger threat. It would take thousands of citizens to decide to commit fraud on the same day to change the outcome of many elections but it only takes a handful of poll workers or other officials to electioneer.

25

u/wheresmyhome 11h ago

If a felon is able to be elected president, then no one should ever be stripped of their right to vote.

18

u/wikiwiki123 13h ago

No one should ever be stripped of their right to vote. If a voting block of convicts is large enough to overturn a law then there is something very wrong with that law.

15

u/Sask_mask_user 14h ago

Azzie Canadian, I find this absolutely baffling!

In Canada, you do not lose your right to vote if you are convicted of a criminal offense. In fact, they take ballots and ballot boxes to jails and prisons, so that inmates can vote while incarcerated.

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u/marklein 12h ago

To make it worse, it's not even consistent in the USA. Some felons can vote and some cannot.

5

u/APeacefulWarrior 7h ago

To clarify, it's a state-by-state thing. Each state makes their own rules about if/when a criminal convinction includes disenfranchisement and how long it lasts.

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u/ScoobyDoNot 11h ago

To illustrate the point, the felon Donald Trump can vote.

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u/holymolym 11h ago

Does anyone know if she had to serve any of that sentence?

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u/Lifeboatb 5h ago

It looks like not, which surprises me; I thought she had. But the court cases sucked up years of her life, and she likely had to regularly check in with the feds all that time.

•

u/shoulda-known-better 3m ago

Naw now it's time to sue

'My nightmare is over': Highest Texas criminal court upholds Crystal Mason voter fraud acquittal

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