One of the closing ads from Democrat James Talarico in the Texas Senate race says that Crystal Mason received a five-year prison sentence for illegal voting “because of Ken Paxton’s crackdown on voters of color.” But there’s more to the story.
Although her vote ultimately did not count, Mason, a Black Texas resident, was convicted and sentenced by a state judge in March 2018 for illegally casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 general election. At the time, she was on supervised release following a felony conviction for tax fraud in 2011. That made her ineligible to vote under state law.
Her conviction and sentence came after Paxton, Talarico’s opponent and the state’s Republican attorney general, announced a voter fraud initiative in early 2018 involving “enforcement and education.”
However, the case against Mason, who was charged in February 2017, was investigated and prosecuted by the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office — not Paxton’s office, as the ad may suggest to viewers. The judge didn’t provide an explanation for the five-year sentence.
The penalty for illegally voting in Texas, a second-degree felony, was up to 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Attempting to vote illegally, a different charge, is a state jail felony, punishable by up to two years in state jail.
Mason tells a shortened version of her story in the Talarico campaign ad encouraging Texans to vote. The ad has aired on television in Texas but has mostly run on digital and streaming platforms, according to AdImpact, which tracks political advertising.
In the ad, Mason says she “didn’t do anything wrong” by casting the provisional ballot, which she correctly notes was “never counted.” Then Talarico says, “Crystal was sentenced to five years in prison because of Ken Paxton’s crackdown on voters of color, putting politics before people.”
A transcript of the bench trial proceedings — which lasted one day — shows that local prosecutors representing the state did ask for a “stern sentence” for Mason “to send a message to illegal voters.” It’s not clear to what extent that, or Paxton’s efforts to combat voter fraud in the state, influenced the ruling by Republican State District Judge Ruben Gonzalez. No explanation was provided for the five-year sentence, according to the transcript.
In defense of the ad, the Talarico campaign pointed to news articles that said Mason was convicted amid a focus by Paxton on illegal voting. A March 2024 NPR article about Mason’s case said the “state’s election policing efforts have been led” by Paxton. Another article from the Texas Monthly in May 2024 said her conviction “came at a time” when Paxton “was spearheading an aggressive crackdown on voter fraud.” And a March 2018 Washington Post article said Mason’s attorney believed her sentence was a result of rhetoric about prosecuting voter fraud from Paxton’s office.
But, as we said, Paxton’s attorney general’s office did not prosecute the case against Mason. That was done by the district attorney’s office in Tarrant County, where Mason lived and submitted the ballot.
Mason said she went to vote in November 2016 not realizing she was ineligible due to being on supervised release after serving time in prison for tax fraud. But being on supervised release meant that her prison sentence wasn’t complete, and, therefore, she couldn’t vote under Texas law.
The HuffPost reported in July 2019 that when a poll worker, Jarrod Streibich, couldn’t find her name on the voter rolls, he told her she could complete a provisional ballot, which allows a person to vote while election officials determine if the ballot is able to be counted.
Streibich, who was also Mason’s neighbor, told the HuffPost that after she finished the ballot and left the polling location, he remembered that she was a felon on supervised release and that her vote shouldn’t count. He reported what happened to a Republican election judge who then notified the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office. That office, led by the county’s district attorney at the time, Sharen Wilson, a Republican, investigated and brought charges against Mason in February 2017. That led to her being convicted a year later.
Mason ended up being sent back to prison for an additional 10 months for violating the terms of her supervised release. She was later released while her case went through a series of appeals that lasted years. Then, in March 2024, the Texas Second Court of Appeals overturned Mason’s conviction, ruling that there was evidence that Mason didn’t knowingly cast an illegal vote. The Court of Criminal Appeals let that ruling stand in September, when it dismissed the prosecution’s petition for review.
It is the case, as the ad suggests, that people of color were often the target of such prosecutions by the Texas attorney general’s office led by Paxton, according to a 2021 analysis done by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The ACLU found that at least 72% of the election fraud cases brought by the state between 2015, when Paxton became attorney general, and 2021, targeted Black and Latino people. The report also said that 45% of the prosecutions targeted Black and Latino women.
But the analysis was based on prosecutions by Paxton and his office, which would not include the case against Mason.
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