Crystal Mason, 43 years of age, said she unintentionally broke the law on voting in 2016 during the presidential voting process, and she’s very sorry for her action which she said was done out of ignorance.
Warren St. John is her lawyer and he explained that the woman who was once a tax agent didn’t have it in mind to vote if not for her mum who motivated her to do so. The former official of tax matters just regained her freedom from prison owned by the federal government, and the cause of her sentence was a laundering case in tax issues that happened in 2012, and she admitted of being guilty of the charges involving the inflation of returns to dupe her customers.
When the election period began in 2016, Mason was serving her punishment and was under community monitoring, however, nobody, not even the probation authority supervising the case, warned her not to vote because as a convict, it’s unconstitutional in Texas, says St. John.
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No escape route for Mason
She’ll have to return to jail for unlawful participation in the elections for additional 5 years.
In 2017, she was charged with illegal election participation and the place where the offense took place was Tarrant County in Texas, where she was found culpable under the jurisdiction of Judge Ruben Gonzalez, the State District last Thursday, regardless of her verbal defenses that used ignorance of the law (which doesn’t permit felons to vote) as an excuse, and she said she wouldn’t have broken the law if she’d been aware.
While expressing her sadness on the development during her charge, she lamented bitterly that she wouldn’t knowingly be careless with her freedom, nor would it be her joy to be away from her children again. She further said that the situation was very difficult for her to bear in her life, going to jail again as a caregiver, breadwinner and mother, all because of an election.
When she was charged with this crime, Mason was of the opinion that her voting must have upset Hilary Clinton’s opponents, because Mason voted for her, hence the unfair judgment.
It’s no surprise that this sort of a thing is happening now at a time when Texas is devoted to serious clampdown on every form of voter scam, an issue which the GOP officials in the state referred to as “common” right from the time past, for which they haven’t been able to give solid evidence, except for abandoned cases like that of Mason.
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Fight against voter scam
A pronouncement that was made in 2016 rejected the tough law under Texas’s constitution regarding ID for voters, a law that lawmakers in the state had labeled as a strategy to block voter scam. The Court of Appeals in the US meant for the fifth Circuit discovered just two condemnations for voter scam in a face-to-face approach, among the 21 million casted votes during the previous years to the time of approving the tenet in 2011.
At the time the election period was in progress in 2016, Trump had frequently lamented that his presidential aspiration was being frustrated by the massive ‘rigging’ which was aimed at killing his chances of winning. However, when he got the victory as the president, he said the high level of voter scam made him lose the majority votes, although his accusations didn’t have proofs.
Though it seems very uncommon to see cases of face-to-face voter scam, voter scam through mail-in occurs more often. Dallas County was forced to set apart approximately 700 irregular mail-in polls per city on the basis of council contest after collecting petitions from citizens who got mail-in polls which they did not ask for.
Yet, when the general voting processes for 2016 were over, Trump gathered a ‘voter scam regulatory agency’, which is no longer functioning, in the middle of his unfounded complaints that a vast number of voters didn’t vote legally. The government under Trump is very determined and it’s clearly shown in Texas’ dedication to catch face-to-face voter scammers.
Last year February, there was a Mexican woman, Rosa Maria Ortega, but a legal foreigner who resided in Tarrant County. She was slammed with an 8-year jail sentence because she lied about her true identity when she called herself an American citizen while filling her voter’s paper. The woman who already has 4 children, defended herself by saying that she was confused about the disparity between the privileges provided for legitimate permanent immigrants and for someone who is an original American citizen, but her excuse fell on deaf ears in court.
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