“Crystal Mason: Texas woman sentenced to five years over voting error acquitted”

Great news from Sam Levine, who has been all over this story for years:

A Texas appeals court has thrown out a five-year prison sentence for Crystal Mason, a Texas woman who was sentenced for trying to cast a provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential election that was rejected.

Mason, now 49, attempted to vote in Fort Worth in the 2016 even though she was ineligible because she was still on supervised release – which is like probation – for a tax felony. She has always maintained she had no idea she was ineligible and only tried to cast a ballot because her mother urged her to.

A judge convicted her in a 2018 trial that lasted just a few hours.

Mason’s case became well known nationally and struck a chord as an example of an egregious punishment for a voting mistake.

In 2022, Texas’s highest criminal court told a lower appellate court it had to reconsider a ruling upholding Mason’s conviction. On Thursday, that court said there was not sufficient evidence Mason knew she was ineligible to vote.

“We conclude that the quantum of the evidence presented in this case is insufficient to support the conclusion that Mason actually realized that she voted knowing that she was ineligible to do so and, therefore, insufficient to support her conviction for illegal voting,” Justice Wade Birdwell wrote for the court in its Thursday ruling….

Read the ruling.

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Campaign Finance Vouchers Do Not Expand the Diversity of Donors: Evidence from Seattle

As I’ve written before, a mistake many political reformers make is in assuming that most citizens are as engaged in politics as the reformers are, or would be if given the appropriate opportunities. A new paper on the Seattle campaign voucher system concludes that providing campaign vouchers to all citizens does not increase the diversity of those who donate to campaigns. Abstract here:

Donating to a campaign is inherently costly, and as a result the composition of campaign donors differs from the composition of the electorate. What happens when the financial barriers to campaign finance participation are removed? This paper analyzes Seattle’s recent campaign finance reform, where all registered voters receive four $25 vouchers to donate to candidates abiding by stricter campaign finance restrictions. Utilizing individual- and census block group-level data combined with administrative donation records, I find that those most mobilized by the availability of vouchers belong to groups already overrepresented within the donor pool. This finding is significant across race, income, past political participation, age, and partisanship. In some cases, the availability of vouchers appears to pull the donor pool further from parity with the larger electorate.

 
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/campaign-finance-vouchers-do-not-expand-the-diversity-of-donors-evidence-from-seattle/BD8E21A4B646DE4EA56BF8787DF0FF81
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“GOP official who claimed 2020 election was stolen voted illegally 9 times, judge rules”

WaPo:

 Georgia Republican official who pushed false claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” was found to have voted illegally nine times, a judge ruled this week.

Brian Pritchard, first vice chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine, as well as investigative costs, and be publicly reprimanded.

Pritchard had been sentenced in 1996 in Pennsylvania to three years’ probation for felony check forgery charges. His probation was revoked three times — once in 1999, after he moved to Georgia, and again in 2002 and 2004. In 2004, a judge imposed a new seven-year probationary sentence on Pritchard, thus making him ineligible to vote until at least 2011 in Georgia, where state law prohibits felons from voting.

Despite that, court documents showed that Pritchard signed voter registration forms in 2008 in which he affirmed that he was “not serving a sentence for having been convicted of a felony involving moral turpitude.” He then cast ballots in four Georgia primary and general elections in 2008, as well as five special, primary and general elections in 2010.

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“Prioritizing the People in the Procurement of Election Infrastructure”

Dennis Mema has posted this draft on SSRN (53 Pub. Con. L. J. 261 (2023)). Here is the abstract:

The continuous and successful holding of elections stands as one of the foundational pillars of American democracy. In the two decades since the passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), federal, state, and local actors have worked in tandem to improve election administration, and, through funding provided by Congress to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), states have been given the means to implement federal best practices. However, there exists a glaring gap wherein many states have diverged from both federal best practices and the behavior of other states—the procurement of election infrastructure such as ballots, voting machines, and tabulators. The procurement processes of some states impose inefficiencies or otherwise negatively impact the administration of elections, while the processes present in others can much more effectively facilitate the resolution of these issues. These processes can have a direct impact on voting rights and the security of election administration. Congress should create a federally implemented procurement standard within HAVA that states must meet in order to receive additional EAC funding; by doing so, the interests of all American voters may be protected at the highest level.

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“Republican-passed bill removes role of Democratic governor if Senate vacancy occurs in Kentucky”

AP:

Kentucky lawmakers gave final approval Thursday to a bill stripping the state’s Democratic governor of any role in picking someone to occupy a U.S. Senate seat if a vacancy occurred in the home state of 82-year-old Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.

The legislation calls for a special election to fill any Senate vacancy from the Bluegrass State. The special election winner would hold the seat for the remainder of the unexpired term.

“So it would be a direct voice of the people determining how the vacancy is filled,” Republican Senate President Robert Stivers said while presenting the bill to his colleagues.

The state Senate voted 34-3 after a brief discussion to send the bill to Gov. Andy Beshear. The governor has denounced the measure as driven by partisanship, but the GOP supermajority legislature could override a veto when lawmakers reconvene for the final two days of this year’s session in mid-April.

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Amid SCOTUS’s Continued Silence, Federal District Court in South Carolina Racial Gerrymandering Case Will Allow Congressional Election to Go Forward Under District It Held Illegal

Here is the order: The present circumstances make it plainly impractical for the Court to adopt a remedial plan for Congressional District No. 1 in advance of the military and overseas absentee ballot deadline of April 27, 2024 mandated under… Continue reading

Judge Recommends John Eastman Be Disbarred, and Pay a Sanction of $10,000, for His Conduct Seeking to Subvert the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election

From the 128-page opinion: As an initial matter, the court rejects Eastman’s contention that this disciplinary proceeding and Eastman’s resultant discipline is motivated by his political views or his representation of President Trump or President Trump’s Campaign. Rather, Eastman’s… Continue reading