Mason says she didn’t know she was ineligible to vote when
she cast a provisional ballot in Fort Worth, Texas, in the November 2016
presidential election. But she was on supervised release after a federal prison
term for tax fraud, making her vote illegal. She found out three months later,
when she was arrested for it.
“They tell you certain things like you can’t be around a
felon, you can’t have a gun,” she told the Fort
Worth Star-Telegram last year. “No one actually said, ‘Hey, you can’t
vote this year.’”
The original case against Mason was brought by Tarrant
County District Attorney Sharen Wilson in February 2017. But critics say it was
not only unduly harsh—it was also hypocritical. Wilson, a Republican, has
been far more lenient in handling an election-related forgery
case involving a Republican justice of the peace, they point
out. And she also committed an election-related impropriety of her own in
2016: asking her staff for personal contact information and then using it to
solicit them for funds for her re-election.
Legal experts are
mixed over whether that was a criminal offense, and a special
prosecutor declined to pursue action against her. But Grant Hayden, a law
professor at Southern Methodist University, said it’s unfair for Wilson to hold
voters like Mason accountable for not knowing election rules and then claiming
not to know rules herself. “Yeah, it looks like a double standard on its face,”
Hayden told The Appeal. “And that’s a problem.”
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2 comments:
Turns out that the Judge who handed down the harsh 5 year sentence also made an election related mistake of his own.
Source:
https://www.unitedwevote.org/home/a-case-of-voter-intimidation#/
Also, the special prosecutor who declined to prosecute Sharen Wilson signed a subscription to the Texas Code of Fair Campaign Fair Practices in which she promises not to engage in activities which would discourage people from voting.
Source:
https://www.unitedwevote.org/maureen-shelton-campaign-finance-reports#/
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