Crystal Mason, a Black woman in Texas who has drawn national headlines over the years after she was handed a five-year prison sentence for illegally casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential election, is seeking to challenge her conviction.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas, the national ACLU, and the Texas Civil Rights Project joined Mason’s attorneys in filing a petition this week to have Texas’s top criminal court review her case.
Andre Segura, who serves as legal director for the ACLU of Texas, called the case “one of the most important voting rights cases in modern Texas history.”
Mason was sentenced to five years in prison back in 2018 for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election, though the vote was never counted, according to a press release from the ACLU of Texas. At the time, Mason had been on supervised release for a previous federal conviction from years before. Convicted felons are barred from voting in the state if they haven’t completed their sentence.
The group said in the release that an appeals court recently shot down an appeal from Mason’s legal team back in March in the case. But the group added the court’s panel of justices also agreed then that Mason “was not aware the state considered her ineligible to vote.”
