In 2011, a Texas court sentenced Crystal Mason to five years in prison for inflating returns on behalf of clients of her tax preparation business. She earned a supervised release after three years, and in 2016, she went to her usual polling place to vote, careful to bring her driver's license to comply with the state's voter identification requirements. When her name could not be found on the rolls, polling place workers kindly walked her through the process of casting a provisional ballot until her eligibility to vote could be ascertained at a later date.

This decision proved disastrous. State law, unbeknownst to Mason and undisclosed by the election workers who helped her, prohibits those convicted of a felony from voting until they have served their entire sentence, including any period of incarceration, parole, supervision, or probation. On Wednesday, for her crime of casting a provisional ballot in a general election held two years ago, a Republican-appointed Texas judge sentenced Mason to five years in prison—the same term to which she had been sentenced for actual fraud five years earlier.

Mason had to sign an affidavit at the polling place stating, among many other things, that she was not serving any part of a punishment for a prior felony conviction at the time—a point on which Judge Ruben Gonzalez harped at her sentencing. "There's a legal connotation to that, right?" he asked her. But relying on her failure to read and understand a boilerplate legal document given to her by poll workers as evidence of criminality is as cynical as it is pedantic. No rational person would believe that Mason cast a provisional ballot understanding that if she was wrong, she would go to prison. "My son is about to graduate. Why would I jeopardize that? Not to vote," she pleaded. "I didn't even want to go vote." Judge Gonzalez was unpersuaded.

The Republican Party's singular obsession with eradicating the scourge of "voter fraud" has never been an honest undertaking. Despite the president's repeated claims borne of the perpetual Hillary Clinton-related fever dream in which he lives his life, and despite his convocation of a since-disbanded "Voter Integrity Commission" to look into the matter in great detail at taxpayer expense, Trump's own lawyers have admitted in court filings that "[a]ll available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake." The specter of widespread, unchecked voter fraud undermining our free and fair elections is scary. It also doesn't exist.

However, laws that restrict the felony franchise do disproportionately affect minority voters, as do the draconian voter identification schemes promulgated of late by GOP-controlled state legislatures. In other words, while these nominal efforts to protect our elections do not solve a problem for the country, they do address one that consistently bedevils the Republican Party. And so, in the rare instance that someone actually breaks the laws that are not broken nearly as often as Kris Kobach and his ilk would have you believe, it behooves them to make an example out of that person, and to shamelessly use their name as a justification for enacting further restrictions on who in America can cast a ballot, and when and how they can do so.

Incidents of voter fraud that do not fit neatly into a preferred narrative have a mysterious habit of disappearing altogether. Last April, a North Carolina woman made news after it was revealed that she had voted twice for Donald Trump, once in her name and once in her deceased mother's name. The Republican district attorney, citing the unnamed woman's "sheer ignorance" of the law, declined to press charges. "It is not in the public's interest to charge her with this felony offense," he explained. In the eyes of the law, a person who voted twice did nothing to deserve a punishment. The black woman who tried to cast a single ballot in her own name, though, must be imprisoned to prevent her from endangering democracy any further.

Crystal Mason's sentence is not law enforcement, inasmuch as that term refers to good-faith efforts to protect this country's elections from legitimate threats. It is state-sanctioned voter intimidation, and the message it sends to minority Americans is that if you are anything less than absolutely, positively sure about your eligibility to vote—no voter ID requirements you can't meet, no special residency restrictions you forgot about, no registration deadlines you missed, no proof-of-citizenship rules of which you aren't aware, and no other arcane hoops through which you've neglected to jump—you're better off not voting at all.