After a 10-Year Nightmare, Crystal Mason is Finally Free From Illegal Voting Charges

After nearly a decade of court battles, Crystal Mason can finally put her illegal voting case behind her. On Thursday (Sept. 24), the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals left Mason’s acquittal standing, effectively ending the case that began after she cast a provisional ballot during the 2016 presidential election, according to CBS Texas. The court dismissed the state’s appeal as “improvidently granted,” with the decision coming on a 5-4 vote.

“After 10 long years of fighting, I am overwhelmed with joy and gratitude,” Mason wrote in a statement shared with The Guardian. “It’s hard to put into words how excited I am right now. This journey has been long, exhausting, and emotional, but God has carried me through it all.”

We previously told you that Mason, a Black woman from Fort Worth, was originally convicted in 2018 and sentenced to five years in prison. Her provisional ballot was never counted.

The controversy centered on whether Mason knew she was legally prohibited from voting. At the time, she was on supervised release following a federal tax-fraud conviction, according to reports. Texas law prohibits people with felony convictions from voting until they have completed their entire sentence, including supervision.

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Mason has consistently maintained that she did not know that she was ineligible to vote. According to reporting from The Guardian, federal probation officials testified during her trial that they had not told Mason she was barred from voting.

Her case took another turn in 2024, when the Second Court of Appeals overturned her conviction, finding that prosecutors had not established that Mason actually knew voting was a crime under the circumstances, according to the ACLU of Texas. Prosecutors then sought to have the ruling reconsidered by the state’s highest criminal court.

That effort is finally over. The Court of Criminal Appeals initially agreed to hear the state’s challenge but ultimately reversed course Thursday and dismissed the appeal, according to CBS News. The court did not rule on the underlying evidence, instead determining that its decision to accept the case for review had been mistaken.

In a separate statement, Tarrant County District Attorney Phil Sorrells stressed that “illegal voting remains a crime.” He added, “If there is evidence that someone knowingly violates our election laws in Tarrant County, we will investigate it and, when the evidence supports it, prosecute it.”

The Root has followed Mason’s story for years, including her transformation from a woman fighting to overturn her own conviction into an advocate for voting rights. Now that the case has finally closed, Mason’s long legal fight has come to an end.