In early February 2017, Crystal Mason’s probation officer asked her to come to the federal building in downtown Fort Worth. The meeting was unusual—maybe a surprise drug test, she thought—but Mason wasn’t too worried. She’d rebuilt her life after serving nearly three years in federal prison for tax fraud, finding a good job and attending night school while caring for her three children and helping to raise four nieces and nephews. When Mason arrived, the check-in felt perfunctory. Then she saw an officer waiting for her in the lobby on her way out. The officer approached her, confirmed who she was, handcuffed her arms behind her back, and told her she was going to jail for what she still considers a baffling charge: illegal voting, a second-degree felony.
Mason had tried to vote in the November 2016 election, not because of any burning interest in politics but rather at the repeated urging of her mother. Neither of them realized that Texas officials considered Mason, who was still under federal supervision for her felony tax fraud conviction, ineligible to vote because of her legal status. At her trial in state court last year, a federal official testified that Mason wasn’t warned that she couldn’t vote in Texas while on supervision because that was considered “common knowledge.”
Mason insists it was an innocent mistake, saying she’d never knowingly risk going back to prison just to vote. Last year, the Tarrant County judge on the case convicted Mason and sentenced her to 5 years in prison.
