Grave injustice
Gov. Abbott should pardon a woman whose punishment for a voting offense is extreme.
Voter fraud is something like the chupacabra of Texas politics. A whole lot of otherwise rational people believe it’s running wild in our state, but actual sightings are so rare people who’ve studied it roll their eyes and say it’s a myth.
Voter fraud does exist, but investigation after investigation has concluded it is extremely rare. Still, like folks who think they’ve seen a chupacabra, when some people see it they get a little hysterical.
That’s what happened last week in Tarrant County, and it has led to a grave injustice.
Rosa Maria Ortega, a 37-year-old mother of four children, is a Mexican citizen who has lived in the United States since she was a baby. She became a legal, permanent resident with a green card when she was eight years old. Her lawyer says she grew up with learning disabilities and dropped out of school after the sixth grade.
She stumbled into legal trouble with what her attorney characterizes as an honest mistake. Ortega thought she had the right — and indeed, the duty — to vote. The registration form she filled out in Dallas County didn’t give her the option of declaring herself a permanent resident, and she reportedly checked a box saying she was a citizen.
“All my life, I was taught I was a U.S. citizen,” she testified, according to The Dallas Morning News.
Ortega cast ballots five times between 2005 and 2014. She considers herself a Republican, so she voted for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election.
After she moved to neighboring Tarrant County, she tried to register in her new community. When election officials told her she couldn’t vote because she checked a box saying she was not a citizen, she filled out another application falsely declaring her citizenship.
So yes, this woman with a sixthgrade education broke the law. She was charged with a crime, but she was not part of some grand conspiracy to steal elections. Out of what was apparently a sense of civic obligation, she wanted to exercise what she thought was her right to vote.
We don’t often agree with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, but in this case his office reportedly tried to do the right thing. In plea bargain negotiations, Ortega’s lawyer says, the state was willing to offer her leniency if she would testify to Texas lawmakers about voter fraud.
Instead, Tarrant County District Attorney Sharen Wilson reportedly quashed those negotiations. And at a time when the newly elected president and his surrogates were promoting wild and baseless claims that millions of people voted illegally in last November’s elections, a jury convicted Ortega and sentenced her to eight years in prison.
That’s right. Eight years.
That Draconian sentence is just the beginning of this woman’s unduly harsh punishment. After her family has been ripped apart and her children have grown into adulthood without their mother, Ortega will probably face deportation to Mexico, a country where she hasn’t lived since she was an infant.
Our state’s governor issued a deeply disappointing statement celebrating the fact that this uneducated woman’s life has been ruined, tweeting that “in Texas you will pay a price for voter fraud.” But even some conservative commentators who share Abbott’s end of the political spectrum were appalled by this act of cruelty. Bill Kristol, a columnist who supports voter ID laws, declared the prison sentence “nuts” and tweeted that “it’s unseemly for the TX governor to be chest-beating about it.”
Ortega’s lawyer is appealing her sentence, but there’s a right thing to do here. It’s abundantly clear this woman thought she had the right to vote. Her only crime was caring enough about her adopted country to vote in its elections. We call upon Gov. Greg Abbott to undo this tragic injustice by pardoning Rosa Ortega, whose life and family should not be shattered because of her misguided sense of civic duty.
Voter fraud does exist, but investigation after investigation has concluded it is extremely rare.