Texas voting law cracks down: I was convicted of voter fraud but my vote didn't even count

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.

My supervised release officer’s own boss testified to that. He told the court that they didn’t warn me that I couldn’t vote because “that’s just not something we do.” 

Daniel Darling: Evangelicals need to admit our failures. But we also must hold on to our hope.

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.”

It’s sad to think that what happened to me could happen to even more people, but it can. Since my conviction, the situation seems to have gotten worse for voters in Texas and in other states. The U.S. Justice Department is now suing Texas over the state's new law, Senate Bill 1, that makes voting harder and scarier, plain and simple. Which is hard to imagine, since Texas was already the hardest and scariest place to vote in the country, according to some analyses. 

Voting shouldn't be confusing

I say we should show more grace to anyone who makes an innocent mistake about voting laws. Election laws shouldn’t be confusing but they are, and so we shouldn’t attach harsh sentences like spending years in prison when someone accidentally makes a mistake.  

My conviction had at least one silver lining. It has broadened my perspective about the importance of voting; I will never take it for granted. And now that my kids are in college, we’re all involved with my voting rights organization, Crystal Mason "The Fight." It has created a family of advocates. We’re fired up to help others know their rights so we don’t have another Crystal Mason case ever again.

The nightmare of online learning: Here's what I've learned as a teacher. It's not pretty.

We’re also here to tell people who their elected officials are and their purpose. I want people to know that when politicians try to criminalize participating in our democracy, like what they are doing here in Texas, there is a real human cost to it. I am an example of that. 

Ultimately, I will never waiver in my faith. I trust in God to deliver the right outcome in my case. One Texas appeals court let my unfair conviction stand, but I am still fighting. I also trust that the majority of Texans who want voting to be easier and more accessible will speak out. We need our Congress, and everyday people like me, to protect our right to vote and push back against attempts to take it away. This is a call to everyone: Your fundamental right to vote is being jeopardized. 

But I’m not about to let anyone see me backing down. I’ll be fighting for the rest of my life to make sure everyone’s voting rights are held sacred, period. 

Crystal Mason, founder of Crystal Mason "The Fight," is a voting rights advocate in Texas.