Brian Pritchard, the first vice chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, has earned a reputation as a prominent election denier. This made it all the more notable when a state judge this week concluded that Pritchard violated state election law after voting unlawfully — nine times.
The Georgia GOP official will not, however, find himself behind bars. As my MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim noted, Pritchard will have to pay a $5,000 fine and will receive a public reprimand from the Georgia election board.
Over the last few years, this has happened with considerable frequency. Quite a few Republicans have been caught casting illegal ballots, and in practically every instance, they’ve received relatively light sentences.
And every time this happens, I’m reminded of Texas’ Crystal Mason, who cast a provisional ballot in the 2016 elections while on supervised release for a federal conviction. She didn’t know she was ineligible to vote, and her ballot was never counted, but Mason — a Black woman — was nevertheless convicted of illegal voting and sentenced to five years in prison.
Mason has been out of prison on an appeal bond, and as NBC News reported, she yesterday received the news she’s been wanting to hear for several years: A Texas appeals court overturned Mason’s five-year prison sentence.
Mason had testified that when she was in prison, she was not informed that she could not vote upon her release, [Second District Appeals Court Justice Wade] Birdwell detailed. She also “emphatically denied” having read the provisional ballot’s affirmations detailing felon voting restrictions, testifying that she did not know she was not allowed to cast a ballot because she was on supervised release from prison, according to Birdwell.
The appeals court judge wasn’t fully satisfied with the defendant’s explanation, but Birdwell wrote that “finding Mason to be not credible — and disbelieving her protestation of actual knowledge — does not suffice as proof of guilt.”
“In the end, the State’s primary evidence was that Mason read the words on the affidavit,” Birdwell said. “But even if she had read them, they are not sufficient — even in the context of the rest of the evidence in this case — to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she actually knew that being on supervised release after having served her entire federal sentence of incarceration made her ineligible to vote by casting a provisional ballot when she did so,” he added. Not surprisingly, Mason was thrilled. “I am overjoyed to see my faith rewarded today,” she said. “I was thrown into this fight for voting rights and will keep swinging to ensure no one else has to face what I’ve endured for over six years, a political ploy where minority voting rights are under attack.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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