Texas’s highest criminal court has brought an end to the lengthy legal saga surrounding Fort Worth resident Crystal Mason, declining Thursday to revive her illegal voting conviction and allowing her acquittal to remain in place.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed the state’s petition seeking to overturn a 2024 ruling that had already thrown out Mason’s original conviction and five-year prison sentence. The court offered minimal explanation, stating only that its prior decision to take up the case had been “improvident.”
The case traces back to the 2016 general election, when Mason cast a provisional ballot in Tarrant County while on supervised release from a prior federal conviction. Poll workers could not locate her voter registration, so she was handed a provisional ballot that was never ultimately counted. Despite the ballot not being tallied, prosecutors charged her with illegal voting, and she was convicted in 2018.
The central dispute throughout years of appeals was not simply whether Mason was ineligible to vote, but whether prosecutors could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she actually knew she was ineligible when she cast that ballot. Mason testified she did not read the warnings printed on the provisional ballot affidavit and that no one had informed her that supervised release barred her from voting.
Two election workers contradicted her account, testifying they observed Mason reading the form carefully before signing it. Mason had also previously acknowledged to a reporter that she “skimmed through” the document.
Texas lawmakers later amended the illegal voting statute to require more than just a signature on a provisional ballot affidavit to establish that a person knowingly broke the law. That change applied retroactively to cases like Mason’s that had not yet been finalized.
In 2024 the Second Court of Appeals reversed her conviction outright, finding the evidence fell short of proving Mason genuinely understood she was ineligible. Four judges dissented from Thursday’s ruling, arguing the court should have weighed in and that the evidence against Mason was more than sufficient.
Tarrant County District Attorney Phil Sorrells defended his office’s decision to pursue the case, saying illegal voting remains a crime in Texas and that his office will continue to prosecute when evidence supports it.
Mason released a statement saying she never lost faith that justice would prevail. “I am so happy my nightmare is over and I can move on” she said through the ACLU of Texas. Advocacy groups including the ACLU and Texas Civil Rights Project celebrated the outcome as a victory for voting rights. Mason and her legal team are expected to speak publicly about the ruling Friday.