New ad features woman wrongly convicted for illegal voting, slams Ken Paxton’s ‘crackdown on voters of color’

A new ad in Texas’ U.S. Senate race puts Attorney General Ken Paxton’s anti-voting record at the center of the campaign, highlighting the state’s dangerous prosecution of a Black woman for voting when she wrongly believed herself to be eligible.

Thinking she was fulfilling her civic duty, Crystal Mason cast a provisional ballot in 2016, which was never counted. No one told her she was ineligible to vote because she was under federal supervised release.

Nonetheless, Mason was charged with voting illegally and convicted in 2018. She faced five years in prison. The charges came amid a widely publicized effort by Paxton to stoke fear over, and encourage prosecutions of, illegal voting.

Her conviction was reversed on appeal in 2024.

In the ad, paid for by the campaign of James Talarico*, Paxton’s Democratic opponent, Mason recounts what happened to her, before Talarico adds: “Crystal was sentenced to five years in prison because of Ken Paxton’s crackdown on voters of color, putting politics before people.”

Paxton led the legal effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, filing a lawsuit that, one legal scholar wrote, could have led to “the end of democracy in the United States.”

*The Elias Law Group (ELG) represents the Talarico campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. ELG Firm Chair Marc Elias is the founder of Democracy Docket.