Is It Racism or Is It Misogyny?
What explains the enormous discrepancy in voter-fraud sentences?
Editorial rights purchased from iStock. Photo by BackyardProduction.
Two Black women have been sentenced to prison for trying to vote. Not for voting, for trying to vote.
One filled out a provisional ballot, which was thrown out because she had a felony record. The other, also convicted of a felony, got a letter from a probation officer in her state certifying her right to vote before she filled out and submitted her voter registration form.
One was sentenced to five years in prison, the other six.
Meanwhile, four white guys filled out ballots and forged the signatures of dead relatives. Three got sentenced to probation and one got three days in jail.
All four white dudes voted for Trump.
Crystal Mason had completed her full sentence in federal prison when she cast her provisional ballot. It was 2016 and she planned to vote for Bernie Sanders.
Mason didn’t know that her right to vote would be denied even after she had completed her sentence. But Mason was on federal supervised release at the time, and would not be eligible to vote until this period of “oversight” was over— a detail nobody bothered to inform Mason about.
When she arrived at the voting location and learned that her name was not on the rolls, she wondered if she had come to the right place. Would her vote count if she showed up at the wrong location? When she expressed her concerns she was told to fill out a provisional ballot. She did.
“In nearly all of the states, after being cast, the provisional ballot is kept separate from other ballots until after the election. A determination is then made as to whether the voter was eligible to vote, and therefore whether the ballot is to be counted.”
Crystal Mason’s ballot was not counted. Still, she was sentenced to five years in prison.
The Tarrant County District Attorney, Sharen Wilson, prosecuted Mason for illegal voting. It was a bench trial, so there was no jury.
During the trial, Crystal’s probation officer admitted that despite having had “multiple conversations about the specific conditions of her supervised release…his office had not warned Crystal that she couldn’t vote while on federal supervised release.”
When questioned as to why Mason was never notified about this fact, his response was: “That’s just not something we do.”
Despite this failure on the part of Mason’s probation officer, the judge in the trial chose to focus on the fact that the left side of Mason’s provisional ballot included language that required her to attest to the fact that she had “completed all of my punishment including any term of incarceration, parole, supervision (emphasis, mine), period of probation, or I have been pardoned.”
According to Crystal, her focus was on the right side of her ballot — the part she had to fill out. She wanted to ensure the personal information she provided was an exact match with her driver’s license. She had heard about recent voter-suppression laws and was worried if she made a mistake, her vote wouldn’t count.
So, while she scanned the left side of the ballot, and verbally confirmed to election officials that she had read and understood the ballot, she had missed one word in the four-sentence paragraph she said she understood — she missed the word “supervision.”
One of the key witnesses against Mason turned out to be her neighbor, a volunteer election judge who had lived next door to Mason for nine years. Mason, who lives in a predominantly white neighborhood, believes the witness was racially motivated.
As one of only three Black families living in her neighborhood, she said this would not be the first time she “experienced hostility from neighbors.”
The prosecuting attorney in the case ignored the fact that Mason had worked tirelessly to rehabilitate herself after fulfilling her sentence, by both working and going to school. Mason also pointed out, while on the stand, that it made no sense to think she would deliberately vote if she were not legally allowed to do so. Why risk everything she’d worked so hard for just to cast a single vote? It made no sense.
Neither the prosecuting attorney nor the judge seemed to give any credence to Mason’s testimony.
It was the stated goal of the prosecuting attorney to “send a message to illegal voters.”
Crystal Mason lives in Texas.
In 2018, also in Texas, “…a white, Republican justice of the peace in Tarrant County pled guilty to submitting fake signatures to secure a place on a primary ballot. Sharen Wilson’s office, the same office that prosecuted Mason, agreed to a sentence of five years’ probation (emphasis, mine).
Pamela Moses, also Black, was sentenced to six years and one day in prison for illegal voting. Moses has 16 prior criminal convictions and has lost her right to citizenship and her right to vote. One of her convictions, in 2015, was for tampering with evidence — a felony that has made her permanently ineligible to vote in Tennessee.
But despite what seems like a straightforward case, Moses says she didn’t know she wasn’t allowed to vote. In fact, the court never sent the documents necessary to remove her from the rolls, according to a letter The Guardian obtained from an election official.
Four years after her felony conviction, when Moses tried to run for Mayor, election officials researched her background and told her she couldn’t run because she was still on probation. That’s when they discovered she’d never been removed from the voter rolls.
Moses thought the judge had calculated her probation incorrectly and believed as long as her probation was over she would be eligible to vote, so she asked the local probation office for help. An officer there signed a certificate that confirmed her probation was over and she was able to vote.
After Moses received the certificate, she included it with her voter registration form which she submitted to the local election office.
The following day, the corrections department sent an email to the election officials saying Moses was “still serving an active felony sentence” and the probation officer had made a mistake.
The mistake, however, wasn’t that Moses was still on active probation. The issue, which was not explained to Moses, was that she was permanently barred from voting in Tennessee due to the nature of her felony conviction.
Moses continues to insist she was unaware of this fact. The probation officer who signed her certificate of eligibility to vote appears to have been unaware of it as well.
In a study conducted in 2017, it was found that approximately 8% of such certificates submitted on behalf of convicted criminals were rejected due to voter ineligibility — yet one attorney at the Campaign Legal Center stated that she was “unaware of any voter in the state ever facing criminal charges for submitting a certificate but later turning out to be ineligible to vote.”
Still, Moses was given a six-year sentence. The judge also accused her of “tricking the probation officer” who gave her the certificate confirming her eligibility.
After reading pretty much everything I could find on Pamela Moses, I have come away with the impression that this is a woman who has experienced numerous cases of discrimination and who lacks the legal knowledge and resources to respond effectively. As a result, she has resorted to criminal activity in an effort to defend herself.
While I won’t attempt to justify her behavior, it seems cruel and unusual to me for her to be accused of tricking the probation officer (without any evidence that I could find) and to be sentenced to six years in prison — particularly in light of the errors made by the probation officer who gave her false information.
Now for the white guys. Four of them, all guilty of committing voter fraud, none of them sentenced to prison.
They are Donald Kirk Hartle from Nevada; Bruce Bartma and Robert Richard Lynn from Pennsylvania and Edward Snodgrass from Ohio. All cast votes for dead relatives.
“None of these GOP voters stumbled into the crimes by mistake. On the contrary, they requested absentee ballots on behalf of dead loved ones and forged signatures as part of their deliberate efforts to cheat.”
Only Snodgrass was sent to jail, and only for three days. The others received nothing more than probation.
So, is this a race thing? It is misogyny? Maybe it’s none of the above and it’s just that the Black women were given harsher sentences because they have prior criminal records.
It is not discriminatory for a judge to consider past criminal convictions when determining sentences. But in the cases of Mason and Moses, one could argue that when it comes to the charge of illegal voting, there was no intent to commit a crime.
Without intent, despite the fact that both have a criminal history, these charges should never have been brought.
The assumption of intent to vote illegally seems to me to have come from over-eager prosecutors and judges, who are too willing to discount the testimony of these women and equally over-eager to apply cruel and unusual punishment for their perceived crimes. Fortunately, both women have legal representation and are actively fighting these charges.
In Mason’s case, her first appeal in May of 2020 was denied by a three-judge appeals panel, but her case is still set to appear before a full panel of judges on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
Unfortunately, because a judge ruled that she violated the terms of her supervised release, she has already had to spend 10 months in jail, in addition to the five years she may end up serving as a result of her original sentence.
Pamela Moses is another story. Due to her long list of criminal activity, she is currently in jail and being denied bail. She is also unable to get her Lupus medication and has now contracted COVID. While she has obtained the representation of a new lawyer, even if the illegal voting charges against her are thrown out, she’s going to be in jail for a while.
The bigger picture here is the damage being done to our democracy as a result of various claims of voter fraud Republicans have been using to justify the recent spate of voter-suppression laws, aimed largely at communities of color.
“More than 440 bills with provisions that restrict voting access have been introduced in 49 states in the 2021 legislative sessions.”
These laws include things like preventing a person from providing food or water to voters waiting in line and removing ballot drop boxes or placing them in locations that are difficult to access for Black people or other people of color.
The irony is, if the examples presented here are any indication, it’s not Black people we need to worry about, it’s white guys — not all of them, of course — just the Republicans.
So, what else is new?