It was the day of the full solar eclipse on the outskirts of Fort Worth last April, and Crystal Mason was trying, just for a second, to relax.
She was barefoot, her feet curled up on a big leather La-Z-Boy sofa, eating two of the turkey sandwiches she had prepared for lunch for her family. Her granddaughter Courtney was turning five that weekend, and Mason was getting everything in place for a princess-themed party.
Mason, 49, had every reason to celebrate. Just a few weeks earlier, a Texas appeals court had thrown out her five-year prison sentence for voter fraud. Mason had been fighting the charge ever since 2017, when she was arrested for trying to cast a provisional ballot while ineligible to vote. She has always said she did not know she could not vote and would not have tried to cast a ballot had she known.
Mason had been convicted and sentenced to five years in prison in 2018.
Her case touched a national nerve and became widely understood as an egregious punishment for what could easily be explained as a mistake. As Donald Trump claimed massive voter fraud in the 2016 election, Mason’s case was seen as part of a broader Republican effort to intimidate people from voting. And while Trump escalated claims of fraud through the 2020 election and its aftermath, Mason’s case stood out as a clear example of what an indiscriminate crackdown on voter fraud looks like.
Since Mason’s arrest, efforts to prosecute voter fraud have only escalated. Tarrant county, where Mason lives, launched its own voter fraud taskforce. Several Republican-led states have created units to investigate and pursue voter fraud charges. One of those units, in Florida, has filed dozens of cases, almost all of which have been against people like Mason, who have prior felony convictions and were confused about their eligibility. In the initial wave of 20 people who were arrested, 14 were Black. One of them was arrested at gunpoint.
“I’m certain these prosecutions of individuals with felony convictions instill fear, which I believe is the intended outcome,” said Dawn Harrington, the executive director of the Free Hearts organization, who works to restore voting rights to people with felony convictions. In Tennessee, where Harrington works, she’s seen prosecutions in at least five counties (the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation announced 11 arrests for voter fraud last week, but offered few details on what happened). Taken in context of a historical legacy of voter suppression, Harrington said she believed high-profile prosecutions “serve as stark warnings, showing severe consequences for attempting to vote”.
Since being convicted, Mason has remained out of prison on an appeal bond for several years, trying to get her life back on track. She’s lost multiple jobs and had trouble getting new ones because of the bad publicity from her case, and nearly lost her home to foreclosure. The last few years of waiting had felt like having “one foot in, one foot out”, she said. Her kids and her mother said that some nights she would come home and cry.
So when she got news of the acquittal in March, Mason, who was getting dinner at a drive-through at the time, broke down crying. It was a moment of vindication – and a sign that she could move on with her life.
Then the district attorney announced he was appealing the case.
‘I’m the sole breadwinner in my family. I don’t want to go back to prison’
People with felony convictions make ripe targets for politicians wanting to send a message about voter fraud.
Since the Jim Crow era, states have barred former felons from voting, a practice that kept many African Americans from the polls even after they were constitutionally granted the right to vote.
Today, 48 states continue this practice, though the rules vary widely by state. Several – like California, Colorado and New York – allow anyone to vote when they complete their prison sentence, while others require completion of probation and parole. Some states, like Mississippi and Tennessee, permanently bar those convicted of certain crimes from ever voting, while others require repayment of all fines, fees and restitution before someone can vote again.
It’s a legacy that continues to have broad implications. As of 2022, an estimated 4.4 million people – 2% of the adult eligible population – couldn’t vote because of a felony conviction, according to a 2022 analysis by the Sentencing Project, a criminal-justice non-profit. Around 5% of voting-age African Americans can’t vote because of a felony conviction – a rate more than three times higher than other Americans.
The vast majority of people who can’t vote because of a felony – about 75% – are not in prison – but they are an easy target for perceived voter fraud. Since they are branded criminals, there’s little public sympathy for their cases; those charged often have little interest in speaking out publicly.
A single prosecution can also have a big ripple effect. Those who are trying to put their criminal history behind them know that a single misstep can land them back in trouble, so they aren’t willing to take that risk.
Since Mason was arrested, there have been a few more high-profile prosecutions of people with felony convictions. In 2021, Texas authorities arrested Hervis Rogers, a Houston man who gained national attention for waiting seven hours in line to vote. The case was eventually thrown out on appeal, but Rogers, who is Black, has since said he will never vote again.
In 2022, Pamela Moses, a Black woman in Tennessee, was sentenced to six years in prison for trying to vote while on probation for a felony. Her conviction was later overturned after the Guardian published government documents that were not disclosed to her defense.
Perhaps no state has deployed this strategy more aggressively than Florida. In 2022, the state governor, Ron DeSantis, created the office of election crimes and security, a first-of-its-kind agency to crack down on election fraud, which is exceedingly rare. That summer, DeSantis held a televised press conference announcing the arrests of more than 20 people for illegally voting. The press conference announcing the arrest was a spectacle – DeSantis appeared at in a courtroom, flanked by uniformed law enforcement officers. All of the people charged had prior murder or sexual offenses, which made them permanently ineligible to vote in Florida.
But after DeSantis’s press conference, it became clear that nearly everyone charged was confused about their eligibility. Florida had made it easier for people with many felony convictions to vote in 2019, and the people the state was targeting appeared to not understand that the change didn’t apply to them. All had received voter registration cards from the state, a sign they took to mean they were eligible to vote.
Blair Bowie, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center, specializes in assisting people with felony convictions get their voting rights back. One of the states where she works is Alabama, where a recent change in the law has increased the number of people with felonies who can vote. But Bowie said she had been in contact with people in Alabama who were newly re-enfranchised but had heard about the Florida prosecutions and were wary of trying to register to vote.
After initially expressing interest in getting their rights back, some of the people she had spoken to told her it wasn’t worth it.
“I’m the sole breadwinner in my family. I can’t do this,” they told her. “I don’t want to go back to prison.”
‘You can hardly talk to Crystal without her trying to sign someone up to vote’
Mason wasn’t especially political in 2016: she voted because her mother was nagging her to. Until recently, she compared voting to taking a shower after playing outside before you go to bed. “It’s just something you’re supposed to do.”
When she showed up at her polling station in 2016, a church near her home, election workers couldn’t find her name on the list of registered voters, so they offered her a chance to vote with a provisional ballot, intended for exactly that kind of circumstance.
If a voter shows up at the polls and there’s a question about their eligibility, they can cast a provisional vote that is only counted if officials later confirm the voter is eligible to cast a ballot. Mason filled out the affidavit that went along with the ballot, taking care to ensure that all of the information exactly matched what was on her driver’s license.
The poll workers had no reason to question her eligibility – they were her neighbors and knew who she was. They knew that she wasn’t lying about her identity and presented a valid Texas driver’s license.
It was only after she left that Jarrod Streibich, a high school teenager volunteering in his first election, said he remembered that Mason had recently returned home from federal prison for a tax felony.
Texas, like several other states, doesn’t allow someone to vote until they have entirely finished their criminal sentence, including probation or parole. Streibich alerted the head poll worker, Karl Diederich, who lived across the street from Mason. Diederich, who was involved with the local Republican party, wasn’t sure whom to call, but he would later contact the local district attorney.
Mason was one of about 4,000 people in Tarrant county who cast a provisional ballot in 2016. Several months later, she would become the only one to be indicted for it. In February 2017, she was placed in handcuffs at the federal courthouse in downtown Dallas during a routine check-in with her supervised release officer.
Since she was arrested for voter fraud, Mason said she went from being someone who didn’t want to talk about politics to starting an organization focused on combating voter suppression.
In 2022, she opened a rally for Beto O’Rourke, who was running for governor. Texas lawmakers passed a law designed to make it harder for someone like Mason to be prosecuted for voter fraud. Four of her children and several other family members are volunteer deputy voter registrars in Texas and are eligible to sign people up to vote.
“You can hardly talk to Crystal Mason for five minutes without her trying to sign someone up to vote,” Alison Grinter, one of her attorneys, said in March.
But there was never really any doubt that Crystal Mason’s case was about much more than Crystal Mason. Prosecutors said it themselves at her trial.
“The voting system in America is second to none. It is sacred to Americans, and she has violated the sanctity of this process,” Matthew Smid, the prosecutor during Mason’s case, said during sentencing at her trial. “We respectfully request that this court send a message to illegal voters that if you’re going to violate the sanctity of this system, it will not be tolerated and [you] will pay the consequences.”
That language set off alarm bells for Kim Cole, another of Mason’s lawyers. Voter fraud in the US is extremely rare; many cases of illegal voting often involve people who simply were confused about their eligibility to vote. During the Jim Crow era, lawmakers often invoked the need to preserve the purity of the ballot box to justify racist restrictions on voting.
“It’s not even subtle,” Cole said. “I think it did intimidate people.”
‘There’s no way I would have ever taken a plea’
It would have been easy enough for Mason to make the case go away. Before she went to trial in 2018, prosecutors offered her the chance to plead guilty and receive 10 years of probation. Many in her position accept these kinds of offers; it’s part of why prosecutors often target people with felony convictions – those who are charged are willing to plead guilty quickly, giving prosecutors a conviction they can tout.
But Mason believed she hadn’t done anything wrong. And since she was already on supervised release, she risked going back to federal prison if she pleaded guilty to the voting crime. “There’s no way I would have ever taken a plea,” she said. “If I’m pleading, that means I’m leaving my kids. And I could never – me being a mom – I could never just leave my kids.”
So on 28 March 2018, Mason and her entire family showed up at the criminal courthouse in downtown Fort Worth. Mason’s lawyer had assured her that it would be an “open and closed” case and so Mason had only taken one day off from her new job (she had lost her old one when she was arrested).
The trial started off pretty well. The first witness was Kenneth Mays, a supervisor in the supervised release office. He testified that no one had told Mason she couldn’t vote.
But when Diederich and Streibich took the stand, things went south. Diederich, a navy veteran who had recently returned from Afghanistan, testified that he had instructed Mason to read a lengthy disclaimer on the provisional affidavit before she filled it out. Buried in the long paragraph is language requiring anyone filling out the form to affirm that if they have been convicted of a felony, they have completed “all of my punishment, including any term of incarceration, parole, and supervision”.
Diederich testified that he couldn’t say for sure whether Mason read the warning, but that it appeared that she did and he wouldn’t have let her vote if he didn’t think she had. Streibich, just a few weeks from leaving for the air force academy, testified that he saw Mason going over the form with her finger.
When Mason took the stand, it hardly seemed to matter what she said. She said she had never even seen Diederich at the polls and never read the affidavit. Had anyone told her she wasn’t eligible, she said, she wouldn’t have voted. “Why would I dare jeopardize losing a good job, saving my house, and leaving my kids again and missing my son from graduating from high school this year as well as going to college on a football scholarship? I wouldn’t dare do that,” she said.
But Smid, the prosecutor, focused on undermining her credibility. Who should the judge believe? Diederich, the navy veteran, and Streibich, who was committed to military service, or Mason, who had old convictions for tax fraud and perjury? He dismissed the idea she wouldn’t commit a crime because she wanted to support her family. “You were not thinking about them when you defrauded the United States government of $4.2m, were you?” Smid said. (Mason, a former tax preparer, was originally convicted in 2012 on charges related to inflating tax refunds for clients and was ordered to pay $4.2m in restitution.)
Gonzalez convicted her and sentenced her to five years in prison. Mason was in disbelief.
News outlets started to pick up on the case. Her conviction came after another woman in Tarrant county, a legal non-citizen, had been sentenced to seven years in prison for also mistakenly voting. Around the same time, there was a white justice of the peace in the same county who pleaded guilty to forging signatures on a ballot but was sentenced to probation and no prison time.
The disparity between the sentences for the two women of color and a white elected official highlighted the blunt racial disparities that seemed to be at play. Still, Mason didn’t really want to speak out about the case. “My motto has always been ‘my business is not show business’,” she said. That, and she wanted to keep her job.
That all changed a few months later. Because Mason was still on supervised release while she had been convicted of the state crime, she was sent back to federal prison for an additional 10 months.
This was an especially difficult time for Mason. When she had gotten out of prison the first time, she had vowed never to go back and had pledged to take care of her family.
Calling her the breadwinner doesn’t quite capture what she means to her family. She has three children of her own, and raised four of her brother’s children. She also has nine grandchildren. Until fairly recently, they all lived with her in her big house.
Her 25-year-old niece, Jasmine Jones, compared her to the cornerstone of a building. Without her, she said, everything would crumble. Her son Sanford, whom she calls Bobo, agreed. “She’s the boss of the company,” he said. “She provides all of the kids with the things they need.”
When she went back to federal prison at the end of 2018, she trained Taylor, her daughter, on how to manage the family’s finances. At the time, Taylor had not even ever paid a phone bill. Her teenage son left college during his freshman year on a football scholarship, returning home to help with the finances. The family almost lost their big house on the outskirts of Fort Worth – the one she and her ex-husband purchased more than a decade ago to be a home base for their family – to foreclosure.
“They don’t know the strain it took on our family,” Taylor said on the afternoon of the eclipse, keeping an eye on her three-year-old son, Karter, who was running around nearby.
Back in federal prison, Mason started reflecting on her case. She knew the judge who convicted and sentenced her was elected by voters, and she began to understand the power of one vote – and why someone would want to limit hers.
She decided that she would start an organization and speak out about her case, seeking to educate people who had felony convictions about their right to vote. “I wasn’t able to register people to vote, but I was able to speak and tell people and share my story,” she said. “I had my kids and family registering people to vote.”
After she left prison, she started an organization called Crystal Mason The Fight. She and her children go to fairs and other events to register people to vote. Recently, Mason said, she was at an Autozone. She began speaking with the man who was helping her and asked him if he was registered to vote. He said he wasn’t because he had a felony conviction seven or eight years ago. Mason said he was surprised to learn there was a possibility that he could vote again if he was done with his sentence.
“We need to be educated from state to state,” Mason said. “That’s what I want to do – I want to outreach and reach out to people that are eligible to vote and let them know they have that right to vote.”
‘My heart is heavy’
The district attorney’s decision to appeal Mason’s case in April was an odd one.
In 2020, the second court of criminal appeals had given prosecutors a major victory when it upheld Mason’s conviction. The panel said that what mattered was not whether Mason knew she was ineligible to vote, but whether she was on supervised release.
“Contrary to Mason’s assertion, the fact that she did not know she was legally ineligible to vote was irrelevant to her prosecution,” Justice Wade Birdwell wrote for the panel. Even though Mason may not have known for sure whether she could vote, the fact that she signed anyway showed that she affirmed her eligibility.
In 2022, the Texas court of criminal appeals, the highest court in Texas, reversed that decision – the first legal victory for Mason in five years. The court said there was not enough evidence that Mason “actually realized” she could not vote, prompting her acquittal two years later in March.
Mason’s lawyers weren’t really expecting an appeal. The Texas court of criminal appeals had already signaled its skepticism of the case. The original prosecutor who indicted Mason, a Republican named Sharen Wilson, had retired and it wasn’t clear that the new district attorney, Republican Phil Sorrels, would want to get tied up in the case. “This is not the kind of opinion you appeal,” Grinter, Mason’s attorney, said in April.
A Sorrels spokeswoman did not respond to an interview request. But when he appealed the decision in April, he said in a statement that the appellate court had wrongly weighed the evidence in Mason’s favor. On 8 May, he said publicly that he was appealing the case to send a message.
“I want would-be illegal voters to know that we’re watching,” Sorrells said. “We’ll follow the law and we would prosecute illegal voting,” he told county commissioners at a briefing that Mason attended, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
In 2022, Mason decided to vote again. Her federal supervised release had expired, and since the illegal voting charge was still under appeal, her lawyers told her she could vote. “It was more personal, and more important to me,” she said. Mason said she had met a woman, a local county commissioner, who had told her her story inspired her to run for office.
Cole, one of Mason’s lawyers, praised her client’s political transformation, but also said it was an unlikely story. “Can you imagine the expense that someone would have had to bear had they just been doing this on their own?” she said. “You just don’t have the muscle to fight.”
A few weeks later, when the state announced it was appealing the case, Mason expressed exasperation in a text message. “I just don’t understand,” she wrote.
“My heart is very, very heavy right now,” she said. “I’m truly sadden[ed] at this moment that the state in this upcoming election is still sending a message.”
