A Texas woman has been sentenced to five years in prison for voting illegally in the 2016 presidential election.
Crystal Mason, 43, is a convicted felon for tax fraud and illegally voted while on supervised release, the Dallas Morning News reported.
Texas law prohibits felons from voting until they complete their full sentence, including supervised release.
According to the prosecutor in the case, Mason was well aware that she was not allowed to vote in 2016. Because her name was not on a registered voter list, the election judge offered her the option of signing an affidavit so she could vote provisionally. The affidavit specifically stated that the voter must not be a felon or must have served their entire sentence.
“The affidavit was a stop sign in front of her face,” Tarrant County prosecutor Matt Smid said.
Mason insists that she did not know she was not eligible to vote and wouldn’t have risked returning to prison.
“I owned up to that. I took accountability for that. I would never do that again,” she said of her prior conviction for tax fraud. “My son is about to graduate. Why would I jeopardize that?”
Mason pleaded guilty in the tax fraud case and was ordered to pay $4.2 million in restitution after she submitted inflated tax refunds to the IRS on behalf of clients.