GOP senator delays elections bill over change
The Texas Senate is taking issue with a late-night bipartisan addition to the GOP priority elections bill that seeks to prevent cases like that of Crystal Mason, a Black woman from Fort Worth who was sentenced to five years in prison for illegally voting, even though she has said she did not know she was ineligible and the ballot never counted.
Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, said in a tweet Friday the amendment was his “only objection” to the bill, which would have otherwise been on its way to the governor’s desk.
Instead, it will now head to a committee of members from each chamber who will negotiate their differences and come up with a new, final bill. Hughes did not respond to a request for comment.
The amendment was pushed by Rep. Briscoe Cain, a Republican from Deer Park, who had been working on it for months with Rep. John Bucy III, a Democrat from Austin. The author of the bill, Rep. Andrew Murr, RJunction, on Thursday approved of the amendment, which passed with no debate.
While Texas law states that a voter must know when he or she is ineligible to vote, the amendment would revise that language to clarify that a person must be aware of the “particular circumstances that make the person not eligible” and also “that those circumstances make the person not eligible” in order to be criminally charged. If passed, the language would be retroactive and could affect Mason’s case.
Cain could not be reached Friday but said Thursday in an interview that he proposed it because “it’s the right thing to do.”
“We’re just clarifying things to make sure that innocent mistakes don’t affect people’s ability to vote,” Cain said.
Mason was on supervised release — after serving five years in federal prison for tax fraud — when she tried to vote in 2016. Texas law prohibits felons from voting while on parole, probation or under supervision.
She has said she did not know she was ineligible when she filled out and signed an affidavit to get her provisional ballot. Yet she was sentenced to five years in state prison, serving 10 months.
Mason is out on bond pending her appeal, which is currently before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court.
The Fort Worth Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s ruling against Mason by arguing that even if Mason did not know she was ineligible to vote, she knew she was on federal supervised release.
The amendment could also possibly impact the case of Hervis Rogers, a Black man from Houston who was arrested this July on charges that he illegally voted in last year’s Democratic primary while on parole. Rogers had made national headlines for waiting six hours in line to vote.
Democrats immediately reacted in anger to Hughes’ opposition to the bipartisan amendment.
“The cruelty is the point,” Rep. Erin Zwiener, D-Driftwood, tweeted.