Fort Worth is suffering a crisis of democracy – just 6% of electors voted in the last midterms – so why is it aggressively pursuing those who mistakenly cast ballots?

When Crystal Mason appears in federal court in Fort Worth, Texas, this week she has been warned by her lawyers to be prepared for the worst. Pack a bag, they told her, talk to your children, be ready to go to prison.

As the clock ticks down to her court hearing on 30 August, she finds herself unable to take that advice. “No, I’m not prepared! I can’t go to prison. I’m not leaving my kids,” she said.

Mason, a 43-year-old mother of three, has been sentenced to five years in Texas state penitentiary – with extra time pending in federal lock-up. All because she committed the crime of voting.

On 8 November 2016, as the world waited with bated breath for the outcome of the Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton election, she walked to her local Fort Worth polling station to perform her civic duty as a US citizen. To her surprise, her name wasn’t registered on the voting rolls, so she cast a provisional ballot pending further checks.

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In the small print of the form it read: “I understand that it is a felony of the 2nd degree to vote in an election for which I know I am not eligible.” She didn’t read those words, focused as she was on correctly entering her personal details.

Nor did she know that under Texas’s strict electoral laws, she was ineligible to vote. By dint of a previous conviction for tax fraud, for which she had served five years in prison, and for which she was now out on supervised release and living back home, she was one of 500,000 Texans barred from the electoral process.

Three months after Trump’s victory she was called to a Fort Worth courthouse, placed in handcuffs and held overnight in jail. She spent the whole night praying. “Lord, how did I get here?” was her cry.

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That was just the start of her descent into the abyss. As she enters what could be her final week as a free woman for a long time, Mason’s story speaks volumes about the way that Texas and other Republican-controlled states are increasingly weaponising the ballot box in a thinly disguised form of voter intimidation designed to suppress turnout among their political foes.

Mason received her five-year sentence for illegal voting in March, and is now appealing on the grounds that the Texas law disenfranchising felons is vaguely and confusingly written. Separately, she faces a return to federal prison at the hearing this week for breach of probation.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” she said when the Guardian met her in Friendship-West, the Baptist mega-church where she worships in Dallas, days before her court hearing. “Why would I vote if I knew I was not eligible? What’s my intent? What was I to gain but losing my kids, losing my mom, potentially losing my house? I have so much to lose, all for casting a vote.”

A vote, she might add, that because of its provisional nature was never even counted.

Why would I vote if I knew I was not eligible? I have so much to lose, all for casting a vote." Crystal Mason

There is a cruel irony to Crystal Mason’s predicament. While it is true that Fort Worth has a major problem with democracy – crisis would not be too strong a word – it is the opposite of the one suggested by her prosecution.

The crisis is not that people are voting illegally, but that they are not voting at all.

With a population of almost 900,000, Fort Worth is the 15th-largest city in the nation with a thriving cultural life and booming commercial sector. Yet it cannot persuade its people to participate in elections.

In 2016, researchers at Portland State University compared the turnout in mayoral ballots in 50 US cities and found that Fort Worth shared joint bottom ranking with its neighbor to the east, Dallas. The two cities each had a turnout of just 6%.

For young voters the statistics are even more alarming: turnout among 18- to 34-year-olds in the city is currently running at 1.5%.

Such figures drive the city’s mayor, Betsy Price, to distraction. “It really bothers me that we can’t get a turnout higher than that,” she said in City Hall. “One of my real concerns is that younger people aren’t voting, yet the decisions we make today will impact their lives for decades.”

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As the midterm elections approach in November, America is facing the harsh reality that its democracy – as defined in terms of the participation of its voters – is withering on the vine.

The last midterm elections in 2014 saw turnout across the country fall to 36% – the lowest in 70 years. Texas suffered the lowest participation rate of any state in the nation, at 28.5%, other than Indiana with 28%.

With participation rates at such dire levels, politicians might be expected to try with equal urgency to boost voting. But at both national and Texas state level, the response from Republicans has been quite the opposite – they have embarked on a rash of efforts that tend to suppress turnout.

Days after he entered the White House, Donald Trump claimed without evidence that 3 million illegal ballots had been cast in the 2016 presidential election – a convenient number as it matched precisely the margin by which Clinton had beaten him in the popular vote.

On the back of such unfounded scaremongering, Trump authorized the creation of a “presidential commission on election integrity” led by the guru of voter suppression, the Kansas secretary of state, Kris Kobach. Within months the commission had tied itself in multiple legal knots, failed to come up with any convincing data on voter fraud, and had been disbanded.

In Texas, the Republican-controlled state legislature has been at the forefront of moves to tighten controls on access to voting. It has pursued rigorous voter-ID laws that have been found by a number of federal court rulings to discriminate against black and Hispanic voters (the law was later upheld by a US appeals court).

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As with Trump’s push for “voter integrity”, Republicans in Texas have tried to justify voter suppression by pointing to widespread fraud at polling stations. Yet an opinion from the US fifth circuit court of appeals concluded that there had been only two convictions for in-person voter fraud in Texas out of 20m votes cast over a decade.

Which brings us back to Crystal Mason and the five-year sentence she is facing for casting a provisional ballot.

Mason is not the only Fort Worth voter to be in dire criminal peril as a result of a clampdown on mythical rampant voter fraud.

In February 2017 Rosa Ortega, 37, a single mother with four children, was found guilty of having cast two illegal votes. When she moved to Fort Worth she had registered to vote, thinking mistakenly that as a Hispanic immigrant who had permanent legal residence in the US she was entitled to vote.

After a three-day trial she was found guilty of voting as a non-US citizen and given an eight-year sentence to be followed by almost certain deportation. “This case shows how serious Texas is about keeping its elections secure,” Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general, said at sentencing.

She wanted to set her children a good example – that voting is an important part of American life." Clark Bridsall, lawyer for Rosa Ortega

The Guardian sought out Ortega but was unable to find her. She is presumed to have left the country before the start of her prison term.

Her defense lawyer at trial, Clark Birdsall, said he had been stunned at the verdict: “My client voted because she thought, wrongly, she was eligible to do so. She wanted to set her children a good example – that voting is an important part of American life.”

Birdsall pointed out that in contrast to the long custodial sentences of both Ortega and Mason – a Hispanic and an African American woman respectively who both insist they voted mistakenly – a white male judge in Tarrant county that includes Fort Worth pleaded guilty in April to forging many signatures as he sought re-election. Russ Casey’s was a conscious act by his own admission, yet he was punished with only probation.

Crystal Mason’s lawyer, Alison Grinter, expresses a similar sense of disbelief about what has happened to her client. She told the Guardian that in her view the aggressive prosecution of Mason by Sharen Wilson, the Republican district attorney of Tarrant county, was tantamount to voter intimidation.

“Black people in Fort Worth hear about her case and they understand that they are not welcome in the voting booth,” she said.

A spokeswoman for Wilson declined to comment.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest “I don’t know the voting laws, I don’t know the conditions they impose,” said Jesse Davis, who lives in the Stop Six neighborhood of Fort Worth. Photograph: Ed Pilkington/THE GUARDIAN

Grinter’s response to Crystal Mason’s predicament as a black voter facing a long prison sentence is echoed by academic research that points to the changing demographics of the city. As Fort Worth has grown, it has drawn African Americans and Hispanics to it, and a majority of its eligible voters are now in Democratic-leaning minority communities: 34% Hispanic, 19% black and 4% Asian to 42% white.

Yet in contrast to other large Texas cities such as Dallas, Houston and San Antonio that have flipped Democratic in recent years, the political overlords of Fort Worth remain overwhelmingly Republican and white. “Fort Worth minorities are not represented in proportion to their population size,” said Dr Emily Farris, a political scientist at Texas Christian University.

She added: “As the Latino and black population grows, those in power grow more concerned about how they are going to remain in power.”

The impact of voter suppression tactics can be seen clearly in black neighborhoods of Fort Worth like Stop Six, an area in the east of the city named after the sixth stop on the 1900s streetcar. Local African American residents who talked to the Guardian as they gathered outdoors on a hot August night all expressed familiarity with the Crystal Mason case.

Jesse Davis, who has “Stop Six” tattooed across his chest, said what had happened to her gave him pause. “It makes me think. I don’t know the voting laws, I don’t know the conditions they impose. So maybe I’d make a mistake when I voted, maybe I’d go to prison.”

The agony of her current plight for Crystal Mason is that she had never intended to vote in the first place. It was her mother who persuaded her. “She was trying to be a good mom. She’s always been like that – if you can vote, go vote, you have to have your voice heard.”

In the five months since receiving her sentence, Mason has lost a good job at a Fort Worth bank after her boss said he was letting her go, due to “adverse publicity”.

One of the distressing side-effects of her prosecution is that her children now say they will never vote. “It’s very discouraging,” she said. “My kids need to vote, but they say they won’t as how can they trust what’s in the fine print?”