Texas’ highest criminal court on Thursday rejected an appeal from prosecutors seeking to reinstate the 2018 conviction of Crystal Mason, a Fort Worth woman sentenced to five years in prison for illegally casting a ballot that wasn’t counted in 2016.
Four of the Court of Criminal Appeals’ nine all-Republican judges filed opinions disagreeing with the outcome.
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In an unsigned opinion, the majority said the court had mistakenly accepted an appeal from prosecutors who sought to overturn a ruling by the Fort Worth-based 2nd Court of Appeals, which reversed Mason’s conviction in 2024. The 2nd Court said prosecutors did not prove Mason knew she was ineligible to vote — a necessary step under state law.
“Having examined the record and the briefs, we conclude that our decision to grant review was improvident,” the majority opinion said without providing reasons for coming to that conclusion.
Judges David Schenck, Kevin Yeary, Lee Finley and Gina Parker filed separate dissenting opinions.
Yeary, who is running for reelection, and Finley said they believed enough evidence was provided to show Mason knowingly cast an illegal vote.
“The only question the Court granted review of today is: whether the evidence was sufficient to support a jury finding beyond a reasonable doubt on one of the discrete constituent elements of the greater offense: the culpable mental state,” Yeary wrote. “I believe that it is.”
Finley also complained that the majority did not provide an explanation for its ruling.
“The citizens of this State are owed some explanation from this Court for why it now refuses to act on the critical issue of election integrity,” Finley wrote. “The State of Texas, as a party in this case, deserves as much.”
Mason said she was relieved to move on from the legal “nightmare.”
“In all these years, I never lost my faith that justice would be done,” she said in a statement. “I hope people who hear my story are encouraged to make their voices heard and to get out and vote. If the right to vote weren’t so important, they wouldn’t be trying to take it away.”
Mason’s case started after she submitted a provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential election, on the advice of a poll worker, after learning that she was not on the voter roll. Her ballot was rejected because she was not eligible to vote while being on supervised release for a federal tax fraud conviction.
Throughout the yearslong legal fight, Mason insisted that she did not know she was ineligible to vote and that she would not have risked her freedom if she had.
Tarrant County District Attorney Phil Sorrells said multiple judges had determined that there was enough evidence to support her conviction.
“A lawful vote should never be canceled out by an unlawful one,” Sorrells said in a statement. “Voters deserve confidence that our elections are fair and that the law will be enforced. Our responsibility has not changed: enforce the law fairly, protect the integrity of our elections, and pursue justice without fear or favor.”
Attorneys who represented Mason from the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Texas and the Texas Civil Rights Project said she should not have been prosecuted in the first place.
“Ms. Mason has spent nearly a decade defending her rights in Texas and today we see that her efforts have been successful not only in defending her own freedom, but also in protecting the ability of Texans across the state to participate in our democracy without fear,” Tommy Buser-Clancy, a senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Texas, said in a statement.
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