Texas voting law cracks down: I was convicted of voter fraud but my vote didn't even count
Crystal Mason
Five years ago, I never thought about being a voting rights advocate. I wanted to focus on being a good mom and a grandmother. If someone would have told me that I would be part of the ongoing fight for our democracy, I would have laughed. But here I am, in this new role because I have personally been harmed by efforts to target people for supposed “illegal voting.”
My life has been destroyed by the claim that I illegally voted – even though I didn’t intend to do anything wrong and my provisional ballot was never even counted. Five years later, my family and I are still battling. And now more than ever, I’m seriously concerned for my fellow Texans and securing their right to vote without fear.
My story should have been simple, but it wasn’t. When I went to my local polling station in 2016, I didn’t know the state of Texas considered me ineligible to vote. Back then, I was still on something called supervised release for a federal conviction. At the end of my sentence, when I was preparing to go home to my family, they told me a lot of things I couldn’t do while on supervised release. But they never told me that I couldn’t vote.
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On Election Day 2016, my mom urged me to vote, even though it was very hard for me to go because of work and school. When my niece and I arrived at the polling place, my name wasn’t on the list of registered voters. I was about to leave but someone asked me if I wanted to fill out a provisional ballot. They said if I was in the right place my ballot would count, and if I wasn’t, it wouldn’t count. That seemed simple to me.
I later found out that a point of provisional ballots is to let someone cast a ballot when there is confusion about their eligibility and then let the state figure out whether the ballot should be counted. And the system worked in my case. Even though I thought I was eligible, my ballot was rejected. Things should have stopped there. Instead, I was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison for “illegal voting.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/texas-voting-law-cracks-down-i-was-convicted-of-voter-fraud-but-my-vote-didnt-even-count/ar-AAQuvlR