As Black Crystal Mason faces a five-year sentence for voting by mistake, white Bruce Bartman got only probation after voting as his dead mother and registering as his dead mother-in-law.
White Trumper Gets Slap On Wrist After Voting As His Dead Mother
Bruce Bartman, voter fraudsterCredit: Twitter screenshot
May 4, 2021

While Trumpers whine about dead people voting and Republicans pass laws obviously intended to suppress votes of people of color and Democrats, it turns out the only known dead voter in Delaware County, Pennsylvania was Trumper Bartman, voting as his dead mother.

According to The Washington Post, Bartman submitted voter registration forms for his deceased mother and his deceased mother-in-law last fall. Both were registered as Republicans. He requested and received an absentee ballot for his mother but did not request one from his mother-in-law. His fraudulent vote in his mother’s name was tallied on Election Day. The county district attorney said Bartman’s was the “only known case of a dead person voting in our county, conspiracy theories notwithstanding.”

When the system caught the dead mother’s registration, Bartman signed a letter saying she was still alive.

More from The Washington Post:

Bartman, 70, pleaded guilty on Friday to a charge of felony perjury and unlawful voting — and blamed his decision to cast the fraudulent ballot on consuming too many false claims about the election.

“I was isolated last year in lockdown,” Bartman said, while apologizing to the judge for his crime, the Associated Press reported. “I listened to too much propaganda and made a stupid mistake.”

I think we can all guess what kind of propaganda and false claims he heard and where he heard it.

Bartman was sentenced to five years probation but, according to The Post, he will be able to vote again after four years.

Compare that to Mason, who was sentenced to five years in jail after mistakenly casting a provisional vote that was never counted. The Texas Tribune explains her case:

After discovering she was not on the voter roll, Mason submitted a provisional ballot in that year’s presidential election on the advice of a poll worker. Because she was still on supervised release for a federal tax fraud conviction, she was not eligible to participate in elections and her vote was rejected. Throughout the case, Mason has said she had no idea she was ineligible to vote under Texas law and wouldn’t have knowingly risked her freedom. But Tarrant County prosecutors pressed forward with charges, arguing Mason’s case came down to intent.

A trial court judge convicted her of illegally voting, a second-degree state felony, relying on an affidavit Mason signed before casting her provisional ballot. The affidavit required individuals to swear that “if a felon, I have completed all my punishment including any term of incarceration, parole, supervision, period of probation, or I have been pardoned.” Mason said she did not read that side of the paper.

The good news is that Texas’ Court of Criminal Appeals, which rarely reviews non-death penalty cases, has agreed to review Mason’s case.

Two justice systems, indeed!

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