Mason v. State of Texas – Voting Rights (TX)
Texas Court of Criminal Appeals & Texas Second Court of Appeals
In This Resource
Crystal Mason, a resident of Tarrant County, Texas, voted in 2016 using a provisional ballot. Provisional ballots allow voters who are unsure of their eligibility to cast a ballot. If election officials determine that the voter is eligible to vote, their vote is counted; if they are not eligible, their vote is not counted.
Mason was one of more than 67,000 Texans who voted using a provisional ballot in the 2016 election because they were unsure if they were eligible to vote. State election officials later determined that Mason was ineligible because she was on supervised release for a federal conviction. After making that determination, Mason’s ballot was not counted.
County prosecutors charged Mason with voter fraud anyway. She was convicted in 2018 and sentenced to five years in prison. (Texas did not prosecute anyone else for using a provisional ballot that year.)
Mason asked an appeals court to review her case and overturn her conviction, but a three-judge panel denied her request and upheld the trial court’s ruling. She then appealed her case to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court.
In May 2022, the Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the appeals court was wrong to uphold Mason’s conviction. Both the trial court and the appeals court failed to require evidence that Mason knew she was ineligible to vote at the time, which the Court of Criminal Appeals held is a requirement to convict someone for voting illegally in Texas. The judges ordered the lower appeals court to re-review the case.
In March 2024, the appeals court overturned Mason’s conviction and acquitted her, finding that there was no evidence that she knew she was ineligible to vote. Later that year, the Tarrant County District Attorney once again asked the Court of Criminal Appeals to review the case and reinstate Mason’s conviction. The high court agreed to take the case in August 2024.
But on Sept. 24, 2026, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed its decision to hear the case and dismissed the district attorney’s appeal, likely finalizing Mason’s acquittal.
On July 22, 2021, a bipartisan group of former state and federal prosecutors, represented by the States United Democracy Center, Cooley LLP, and Susman Godfrey LLP, filed an amicus brief in the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in support of Mason.
The former prosecutors urged the court to reverse Mason’s conviction, arguing that Texas law makes clear that a voter must be proven to have known they were ineligible to vote to warrant illegal voting charges, and that prosecutors did not meet that standard.
The group also argued that the state’s prosecution of Mason was “far outside the bounds of any reasonable exercise of prosecutorial power.”
“Ms. Mason’s prosecution undermines public trust in the law and in those making prosecutorial decisions,” the group wrote.
A similar group of amici, also represented by States United, Cooley, and Susman Godfrey, filed another brief in 2023 after the case was sent back to the Second Court of Appeals. The brief emphasized that in Mason’s case, Texas’s provisional ballot system worked exactly as intended, and her vote was never counted. Prosecuting Mason thus “chills others from exercising their fundamental right to vote through the provisional ballot system,” they wrote.
The 2023 group again argued against Mason’s conviction before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in a 2024 brief, urging the high court to uphold Mason’s acquittal.
- The Texas Tribune: Crystal Mason prevails in fight over illegal voting conviction
- Fort Worth Star-Telegram: Bipartisan prosecutors call for court to uphold Crystal Mason’s illegal voting acquittal
- Fort Worth Star-Telegram: Tarrant County voter fraud case ‘threatens the integrity’ of democracy, group says