Woman’s illegal-voting sentence reeks of racism

A Pennsylvania man was sentenced to five years of probation for illegally voting for President Donald Trump on behalf of his dead mother in last year’s election. An Iowa woman who tried to vote twice for Trump in 2016 got two years probation and a $750 fine. Meanwhile, a Texas woman who cast a provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential election, illegal because she was on supervised release for a past felony conviction, has been sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.

Bruce Bartman, the Pennsylvania man, is white. So is Terri Lynn Rote, the Iowa woman. Crystal Mason, the Texas woman, is Black. The disparity in how these cases were handled is more than suggestive. Too often, people of color get the book thrown at them while their white counterparts get a slap on the wrist.

Mason said she made a mistake but an innocent one. She hadn’t realized that because she was on federal supervised release after serving almost three years in prison for tax fraud, Texas considered her ineligible to vote. Mason’s probation officer acknowledged he had never warned her that she couldn’t vote and her provisional ballot was never counted, but that didn’t matter to Texas authorities, who pulled out all stops in prosecuting her.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has joined the legal team pursuing her ongoing appeal, has noted that the same office that prosecuted Mason’s case agreed in 2018 to a sentence of five years’ probation for a white Republican justice of the peace who had pleaded guilty to submitting fake signatures to secure a place on a primary ballot. “It was to make an example out of me,” said Mason, echoing the view that her prosecution was intended to send a message to minority voters to stay away from the polls.

There are, as the fact-checking website Snopes.com pointed out, distinctions in state laws and sentencing guidelines that may account for some of the differences in the outcomes of the cases. But we do not believe that Mason would be facing a five-year prison sentence if she were white. As Rep. Ro Khanna, D-calif., asked in a Facebook post, “How is this fair?”

Too often, people of color get the book thrown at them while their white counterparts get a slap on the wrist.