‘Trapped in the past’

Fort Worth, Texas – There’s an elephant in the room when Crystal Mason talks about her seemingly never-ending legal case. It’s her three-year-old grandson, Karter.

Stomping around Mason's home in Fort Worth, Texas, Karter clenches a plastic straw between his teeth as a makeshift trunk. He lifts his head towards the sky and blows through the straw with all his might, delivering his best interpretation of an elephant’s trumpet.

It’s a moment of silliness that makes Mason, 49, break into a wide smile.

“He thinks he’s an elephant,” Mason told Al Jazeera. “He can name every animal. We took him to the zoo recently, and he was so fascinated.”

Caught up in the memory, Mason lets herself relax. But only for a moment.

Heavy on Mason’s mind is the prospect that she could return to jail on charges of illegal voting.

What happened, she said, was a misunderstanding. But her case has raised questions about the restrictions some parts of the United States put on people with felony records — and their right to vote.

Increasingly, states are moving away from restricting those who have served their sentences. In the last quarter-century, approximately 26 states, plus Washington, DC, have restored the right to vote for most people with felony convictions, with some exceptions for severe crimes like murder and sexual assault.

“Nationally, tremendous progress has been made,” said Blair Bowie, a lawyer and the director of the Restore Your Vote project, which advocates against the disenfranchisement of voters with past convictions.

But in recent years, some states, like Virginia and Tennessee, have bucked the trend, heightening the threshold for the restoration of voting rights.

In other states, like Texas, the automatic restoration of voting rights comes with caveats — something critics blame for stirring up confusion and leading to situations like Mason’s.

“Texas is unique,” Bowie said, “because of the way it goes after voters. It’s one of those states that’s trapped in the past.”

Lawyers, advocates and historians say that — because of the variation in laws and the disproportionate effects of incarceration on certain demographics — geography and race have therefore become some of the biggest factors affecting voting rights today.

For Mason, the trouble started in 2016. A mother of three, she had recently been released from custody after serving a sentence for felony tax fraud.

It was a big year at the ballot box, with the presidency up for grabs as well as control of Congress, and Mason said her mother encouraged her to vote.

So on November 8, 2016, she arrived at a local polling station in Tarrant County, Texas, to cast her ballot. But Mason discovered her name was not on the voting rolls. No matter: An election worker offered her a provisional ballot to fill out instead.

But by February 2017, she was back in custody, this time facing charges of illegal voting, a second-degree felony with a possible sentence of up to 20 years.

In Texas, people with felony records automatically have their right to vote restored — but only after their sentence has been “fully discharged”. Mason thought her release from prison meant she was in the clear.

But Texas law considers periods of parole, community supervision and probation to be part of the sentence.

Mason had no idea she could not vote. She had been on supervised release when she cast her ballot, but she said she had been sent a voter registration card while staying at a halfway house following her release.

Thus began a legal odyssey that has continued through this year.

Defence lawyers have argued Mason did not knowingly vote illegally, and they called on the testimony of the election worker who gave Mason her provisional ballot.

They also noted that Mason’s vote did not count anyway. Provisional ballots are subject to additional scrutiny and are not tallied unless voter eligibility is confirmed.

The Tarrant County district attorney, however, argued that prosecuting Mason was a question of upholding election security. In 2018, Mason was sentenced to five years in prison.

But as she appealed the lengthy sentence, her plight earned international headlines. She ultimately served 10 months before her release on bond — and just this March, Texas’s Second Court of Appeals overturned her conviction.

Still, District Attorney Phil Sorrells, a Republican, has pledged as recently as May to appeal the court’s decision.

In response to questions from Al Jazeera, his office shared a news release that reads, in part, “This office will protect the ballot box from fraudsters who think our laws don't apply to them.”

Mason, however, has maintained that the fault lies with the “messy” process surrounding the restoration of voting rights in Texas. She expressed surprise at the district attorney’s decision.

“I was stunned,” Mason told Al Jazeera. “I feel like, instead of attacking one person, let's fix the system.”

Experts say the patchwork of laws in the US — differing state by state — fosters situations like Mason’s, ensnaring otherwise innocent people.

"Confusion has real consequences, as evidenced by Ms Mason's case,” Patrick Berry, a lawyer with New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, told Al Jazeera. “States like Texas, Florida and Tennessee are prosecuting people for mistakes, and it’s often unjust.”

One high-profile case has renewed the debate around situations like Mason’s: the conviction of former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential race.

In May, Trump became the first former president to be found guilty on criminal charges: He was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to boost his election prospects.

With Trump himself now convicted of felonies, the rules about who can and cannot vote have received new scrutiny.

However, the experts interviewed for this story said they are sceptical that any sweeping change in voting law will result from the former president’s trial.

“It’s a unique scenario: a one-off,” said Rick Halperin, a historian and professor of human rights at Southern Methodist University.

Already, Ron DeSantis — the governor in Trump’s home state of Florida — has called the ex-president “an easy case to qualify for restoration of rights”. DeSantis himself chairs the state’s clemency board, and he suggested he would be inclined to intervene on Trump’s behalf.

But experts like Halperin point out that circumstances like Trump’s are rare. Many of those with felony records face steep barriers to reclaiming their voting rights.

The affected population is large. A 2017 study estimated that, as of 2010, an estimated 19 million Americans had a felony record, representing 8 percent of adults in the country.

That proportion was even higher among certain demographics: An estimated 33 percent of Black men were affected by felony convictions.

For Halperin, this points to an ongoing struggle for equal access to the vote that stretches back to the dawn of the US.

“The history of this country is the history of people trying to get the right to vote and facing incredible resistance,” he said.

Black disenfranchisement is a big part of that history, he added. After the US Civil War, many states implemented laws to keep formerly enslaved people from wielding political power.

They included measures prohibiting citizens from voting if they had a felony conviction. Before the Civil War, in 1840, only four states had such laws. In 1870, 28 states did.

At the time, many trivial offences and even interracial marriage were treated as felonies, fuelling criticism that these laws were explicitly designed to disenfranchise Black voters.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed to undo the damage inflicted by these laws, but in 2013, the Supreme Court gutted a key provision.

The court found that states and districts with a history of racial discrimination no longer needed federal approval to change their election laws or procedures.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, this decision created a sharp uptick in the disparity between white and non-white voter turnout.

In counties previously subject to such approvals, the centre found that the gap between white and Black voter turnout widened as much as 11 percentage points from 2012 to 2020.

But Bowie, the director of the Restore Your Vote project, said the questions about Trump’s voting rights point to broad implications for the entire voting public, no matter their demographics.

“The Trump case highlights something that's been true for a while: While felony disenfranchisement was designed to uphold white supremacy and has a disproportionate impact on people of colour, it doesn't mean it solely or exclusively affects people of colour,” Bowie said.

Some experts argue that the circumstances of Trump’s presidency actually contributed to the tightening of voter access laws.

After he was defeated in the 2020 presidential race, Trump spread widely discredited claims that voter fraud tipped the outcome. That prompted Republican politicians across the country to propose and pass laws to “protect the vote”.

Bob Stein, a voting expert and political science professor at Rice University, said that the recent efforts to disenfranchise people with felony convictions are “political red meat” — intentionally crafted to appeal to right-wing voters.

“Much of what we see here is an effort to appease disinformation,” Stein told Al Jazeera.

“It was suggested to me by one lawmaker that, if you don't get behind this, you're in trouble, because these laws rally the base.”

But voter fraud is relatively rare. A 2007 report from the Brennan Center found that the rate of fraud ranged between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent in the US.

More recently, in 2014, Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt told The Washington Post he had only found 31 proven cases of election fraud — out of more than a billion ballots cast since 2000.

Stein added that many of the recent laws designed to restrict voting have sparked backlash. “For the Republicans, a lot of election laws were either poorly conceived, improperly implemented or, as one legislator said to me, ‘something our voters wanted’.”

Tennessee offers a recent example. In 2023, it implemented a two-step process for reclaiming voting rights after a felony conviction.

First, a would-be voter had to either receive an official pardon or have a judge restore their full constitutional rights. Then, the aspiring voter would have to pay all their remaining court costs.

But advocates like Bowie argue that Tennessee is attempting to permanently disenfranchise people with felonies by making its standards too narrow.

The state “has the most restrictive rights restoration process”, Bowie explained. She pointed out that, earlier this year, Tennessee officials confirmed that having “full constitutional rights” meant having the right to own a firearm.

That effectively puts voting rights out of reach for anyone with a felony conviction for drugs or violence, as Tennessee law specifically bars them from gun ownership.

But some advocates are pushing back against such restrictions — including Mason, whose case in Texas sparked a media firestorm.

She has launched her own organisation, called Crystal Mason “The Fight”, to address “voter suppression across the nation”.

The group registers voters and educates people about their rights, including those with felony convictions.

Faced with Mason’s continuing legal battles, her daughter, Taylor Hobbs, said she sometimes struggles to remain optimistic. “It just seems like they don’t want us to be happy,” Taylor said

But Mason points to her family as a motivation to keep fighting. As she and Hobbs prepared T-shirts for their organisation, little Karter ran around the house, making his mighty roar.

Mason cast a glance at the young animal lover and smiled, shaking her head.

“How can anyone think I’d do anything that’d keep me from family?” she said.