Rosa Ortega does not deny she made a mistake.

What she finds hard to accept is that her error should merit eight years in prison, almost certain deportation to a country she barely knows, separation from her children and notoriety in rightwing circles.

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“Send me back to Mexico. Get it over with,” she said in an interview with the Guardian on Friday, sitting behind a glass partition in the Tarrant County corrections centre in downtown Fort Worth, Texas. “I’m done, this is already too much, it’s too much and I’m just sitting there, sitting there, sitting there, and I don’t even sleep, I don’t sleep, I don’t do nothing here. On my mind, from day to night, is my kids.”

Ortega was brought to the US from Mexico as a baby and lived legally in Texas as a permanent resident. While her green card entitled her to many of the same privileges as an American citizen, it did not confer the right to vote – yet vote she did, repeatedly, in elections in the Dallas area.

No one is claiming that she was the head of a conspiracy to undermine democracy, a mastermind who schemed to pervert the rightful outcome of elections. Ortega insists she was simply confused and voted as a result of misunderstandings compounded by the wording of registration forms, her sixth-grade education level and growing up as if she was a native-born Texan.

But her timing was terrible. She was found guilty of voter fraud and sentenced by a jury earlier this month, days after headlines sparked by Donald Trump’s spurious claim that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election. And the location was not ideal, either – a trial in a county where 52% of people backed Trump last November, in a Republican-dominated state where senior politicians have for years declared improper voting to be a serious problem, despite scant proof to back up their scaremongering.

Even when there is calculated misconduct such as casting multiple ballots in a single election, illegal voting is a crime that typically results in probation or a small amount of jail time.

Or at least, it did. The otherwise law-abiding Ortega was handed two eight-year sentences, to run concurrently, on two charges relating to elections in 2012 and 2014. “Eight years, second-degree felony with a clean record, it’s sad,” she said. “Man, I’m just being set up, that’s what it is, just for an example.” The 37-year-old is awaiting transfer to a state prison.

“If somebody’s deliberately trying to contort the outcome of an election, then this might be an appropriate sentence. But for somebody who is ignorant and votes out of ignorance, this is clearly not the right punishment for them,” said her attorney, Clark Birdsall.

“I just think it’s a sign of the political times right now. Trump has brought with him an aura that it’s OK to hate again and that could mean anybody and, in this particular case, it means somebody accused of illegal voting, especially a Latino accused of illegal voting. I think the sentence is way out of line, way out of proportion, but it’s where we are as a country now I guess.”

She has filed an appeal and Birdsall plans to ask the trial judge to convert the sentence to probation. Whenever she is released, she expects to be taken immediately into custody by federal immigration agents and deported to Mexico, a country she said she last visited when she was about 14. “I don’t even know how it is over there now,” she said. Still, sounding frustrated, she said she would welcome deportation if it meant she could get out of jail.

Ortega is a mother of four American citizen children, aged from 12 to 16, and expects they would remain in the US rather than move to Mexico to join her. Ortega said she is reluctant to let her children visit her in jail because it is too traumatic for them.

Evidence was presented at trial that Ortega cast ballots five times over a decade in Dallas County. She said she voted out of a sense of civic duty: “I just wanted them to hear my voice, I just wanted to speak out like anybody else that wanted to vote.”

She then moved to neighbouring Tarrant County, where, prosecutors said, she met with election officials and tried to register but was stopped after checking a box to say she was not a US citizen. She later filled out a mail-in registration on which she claimed to be a US citizen, they said, prompting an investigation. She was arrested in 2015.

Her conviction was widely reported by rightwing media. But Ortega is an imperfect avatar for the argument that illegal voting is widespread among Democrats: she voted Republican. “I really though they were good people, but my family’s like: ‘Why did you vote Republican?’” Ortega said.

In 2012 she cast a presidential ballot for Mitt Romney, and in 2014, in a state GOP run-off, she backed Ken Paxton, now the attorney general, who was involved in prosecuting her. “This case shows how serious Texas is about keeping its elections secure,” he said in a statement.

So serious that it has in effect disenfranchised many minority voters, according to critics who contend that Texas wants to discourage people likely to lean Democratic from casting ballots. The state introduced perhaps the country’s most stringent voter ID law in 2011 and has suffered a series of setbacks in court during attempts to defend it.

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For a decade, though, Ortega’s assertion that she was entitled to vote appears to have been taken on trust. “The right to vote is one of the most fundamental rights we have as American citizens, and this verdict is a strong statement from the citizens to the legislature on how serious our community is about voter fraud. At a minimum, statements made in applications to vote should be verified before handing out voter registration cards,” said Sharen Wilson, the Tarrant County criminal district attorney, a Republican, in a statement.

“They should have been checking these people to see if they’re eligible and certainly Rosa Maria Ortega thought that’s exactly what they were doing. And so when they sent her her voter card, she just assumed ‘well, they’ve checked it out and determined me eligible to vote, so I guess I’m good’,” Birdsall said.

“That’s all it is, a human mistake and they just want to make a big deal out of it, bring me to the news and it’s just unfair what they did. Very unfair,” Ortega said. Adding to her feeling of injustice as she awaited trial were the emails that would regularly ping into her inbox: invitations to GOP events in Dallas.

As a supporter eager to play an active role in the political process in a state with one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country, she had signed up to their mailing list. “They’re still sending me emails, the Republicans,” she said.