Tarrant County DA appeals ruling that overturned Crystal Mason’s illegal voting conviction

The Tarrant County District Attorney’s office is asking an appellate court to reverse a ruling that overturned Crystal Mason’s illegal voting conviction.

The Texas Second Court of Appeals on March 28 found Mason’s 2018 conviction should be overturned because she didn’t have actual knowledge that she couldn’t vote while on federal supervised release in a tax fraud case. Mason, a Rendon resident, was convicted of illegal voting in a March 2018 bench trial in a Tarrant County district court.

That verdict should be affirmed, the district attorney’s office said in a Thursday news release, announcing the case’s appeal to the state’s highest criminal appellate court, the Court of Criminal Appeals. A copy of the appeal was not immediately available on the court’s website.

“Voting is a cornerstone of our democracy,” the district attorney’s office said. “This office will protect the ballot box from fraudsters who think our laws don’t apply to them.”

Tommy Buser-Clancy, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Texas and one of Mason’s attorneys, called the appeal “disappointing” in a Thursday statement.

“It is disappointing that the state has chosen to request further review of Crystal Mason’s case, but we are confident that justice will ultimately prevail,” Buser-Clancy said. “The court of appeals’ decision was well reasoned and correct. It is time for to give Ms. Mason peace with her family.”

Mason was not available for an interview Thursday.

The development is the latest in the years-long case.

Mason cast a provisional ballot in 2016 in Tarrant County while on supervised release for a 2012 tax fraud conviction. The vote was never counted. She was later found guilty of voting illegally and sentenced to five years in prison.

In the years since, the case has woven through the state’s appellate system.

Mason’s attorneys have argued that she wasn’t aware she wasn’t allowed to vote. In their Thursday news release, the Tarrant County District Attorney’s office argued that Mason was “convicted based on testimony from the election judge and poll clerk that she read the provisional voter affidavit, affirmed that she provided accurate information, signed the affidavit, and testified that the affidavit language was clearly understandable to mean that a convicted felon, such as herself, was ineligible to vote.”

The Second Court of Appeals in March found that there was insufficient evidence to find that Mason “actually realized that she voted knowing that she was ineligible to do” and to support her conviction.

The state’s main evidence was that Mason read the words on a provisional ballot affidavit that included information about voter eligibility, the court found.

“But even if she had read them, they are not sufficient — even in the context of the rest of the evidence in this case — to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she actually knew that being on supervised release after having served her entire federal sentence of incarceration made her ineligible to vote by casting a provisional ballot when she did so,” the opinion reads.