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The Missing Factor in the Election Story: Turnout

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The Missing Factor in the Election Story: Turnout

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Informational Source
Rhetorical Situation:

Writer: Robert Kuttner

Text/subject: The Missing Factor in the Election Story: Turnout talks about voters changing their votes for what is happening right now and having a shocking outcome

Audience: The general population in the US, People who are interested in Politics.

Context: History of voting rights, Statistics about voting

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You have probably been reading the same depressing stories that I have. They say that the election is trending away from the Democrats. People don't want to talk about Trump's lunacy, or the Republican assault on democracy or on reproductive rights. They want to talk about inflation. And despite Joe Biden's very real achievements, the economy as a prime issue is helping Republicans.

It's possible to challenge each of these assertions, which are based on marginal evidence of shifting voter preferences and a media herd instinct. But what's missing from nearly all of them is the variable that matters most: turnout.

Mike Podhorzer, who was the longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, likes to point out that in a deeply polarized country, there are few swing voters, but lots of swing districts. How can that be? Which way the districts swing reflects whose voters turn out. According to Podhorzer, "House Democrats' fortunes depend most on how many of their 2020 voters sit this one out relative to Trump voters, and not how many more voters defect from Biden to House Republicans than from Trump to House Democrats."

Granted, gerrymandering has reduced the number of swing seats in 2022, as the politicians pick their voters. But if turnout is like it was in 2018, when Democrats made a net gain of 41 House seats, then it will be a much better election for them a week from today than most of the pundits are forecasting. And much of the high turnout will be among women, who also led the 2018 Democratic wave.

Here again, the conventional view is that abortion rights have faded as a galvanizing issue. But while they have faded from the headlines, they may not have faded from the consciousness of women voters. A recent ABC/Ipsos poll, emphasizing economic issues, mentions in passing that 61 percent of voters favor abortion rights.

But other than gut instinct, how can we accurately forecast turnout, among women or generally? I put that question to Anna Greenberg, a leading Democratic pollster who also follows women's voting behavior as astutely as anyone on the scene.

Greenberg tells me that while obviously nobody has a crystal ball, there are some useful harbingers. One is early voting, where Democrats have turned out more than Republicans. This has to be qualified by the fact that early voting has become a Democratic habit; Republicans are more likely to vote on Election Day.

Even so, the signs are heartening. As of October 30, Democratic early voting for 2022 was exceeding early voting in the Democratic wave election of 2018, while Republican early voting was lagging it.

Now, early voting is so much easier than in 2018 in most of the country, and the pandemic upended so many voting habits, that it's hard to extrapolate very much from those statistics. But Greenberg says her polls and other proprietary polls suggest that women intend to vote in large numbers next week. In the five states that report early voting by gender (Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and North Carolina), 54.4 percent of the early voters have been women, while 44.3 percent have been men.

There was a huge surge in women's registration after the Dobbs decision.

Tom Bonier of TargetSmart, who has been vocal about women's turnout since Dobbs, points out that women's requests for vote-by-mail ballots have far exceed those by men, and that the statistics probably understate the energy of younger women.

There was a huge surge in women's registration after the Dobbs decision. And Greenberg adds this subtle insight: "From what I've seen from my polls," she says, "it isn't that the impact of Dobbs has faded. It's that there are diminishing returns." By that, Greenberg means that women who have been motivated to vote because of abortion rights are already pretty locked in. Other voters, such as college-educated men (who tend to be anti-MAGA but not primarily moved by reproductive rights) need to be motivated to turn out based on other issues.

Women have turned out to a greater degree than men in every off-year election since 1966, and women's participation was especially strong in 2018. Greenberg believes that 2022 could well be more like 2018 in terms of turnout, especially women's turnout, than like other off-year elections. Higher turnout could offset the slight Republican trends based on issue preferences cited in article after article.

One other factor cuts against the gloom: Trump's endorsements have delivered Republican nominations to badly blemished candidates who are personally more vulnerable than their districts.

Turnout will also influence the very close Senate races that will determine which party keeps control. And there are more Democratic paths than Republican ones for the Democrats to remain the Senate majority.

To flip the Senate, Republicans would need to knock off Democratic incumbents in Georgia and/or Nevada, and Democrats would need to blow all of their pickup opportunities, in Pennsylvania and Ohio as well as Wisconsin. Republican incumbent Mike Lee in Utah would need to fend off a surprisingly strong challenge from independent Evan McMullin, and in Iowa, 89-year-old incumbent Chuck Grassley would need to stop sinking in the polls against Democrat Mike Franken.

Conversely, Democrats need only one hold (Warnock in Georgia or Cortez Masto in Nevada), and one pickup (most likely Fetterman in Pennsylvania), and they keep the Senate; Arizona and New Hampshire look out of reach for Republicans. If Democrats hold both Georgia and Nevada and win Pennsylvania, they make a net gain of one.

All of these elections will likely be very close, so the post-election story will either be good or bad for Democrats based on one- or two-point differences. If the news is better than the gloomy stories of the past two weeks, turnout could well make the difference.

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The Missing Factor in the Election Story: Turnout

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It's the variable that matters most, but you won't see it in most of the punditry predicting Democratic losses.

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Why restoring voting rights to former felons is “one of the key civil right issues of our time”

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Why restoring voting rights to former felons is “one of the key civil right issues of our time”

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Informational Source
Rhetorical Situation:

Writer: Courtney Connley

Text/subject: This video talks about how it is important that former criminals have the right to vote.

Audience: US general population, Interest in politics

Context: Voting rights, former criminals

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CRYSTAL MASON THOUGHT SHE HAD THE RIGHT TO VOTE. TEXAS SENTENCED HER TO FIVE YEARS IN PRISON FOR TRYING.

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CRYSTAL MASON THOUGHT SHE HAD THE RIGHT TO VOTE. TEXAS SENTENCED HER TO FIVE YEARS IN PRISON FOR TRYING.

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Creative Source
Rhetorical Situation:

Writer: Amrit Cheng

Text/subject: This article talks about a woman named Crystal Mason wanting to vote but then gets sentenced to five years in prison for trying to vote

Audience: The general US population, Interest in politics

Context: A story about voting, Policing

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The case of a Texas mother is a window into how the myth of voter fraud is being weaponized to suppress the vote.

Crystal Mason, a Texas mother of three, is on her way to a job interview but first needs to get her hair done. She stops by the Straight Line Barber Lounge, where the barber is a friend. As they chat, the TV plays in the background, announcing which presidential candidates have qualified to participate in the first Democratic Party debate. It's a crowded field, and Crystal has thoughts. She likes Beto O'Rourke, who her daughter worked for, and Bernie Sanders.

ELECTION DAY

It was November 8, 2016 - Election Day in Tarrant County, the third most populous county in Texas. Crystal wasn't sure whether she'd make it to the polls in time but had promised her mother that she would try. She left work around 4:30 p.m. and drove through the rain to the Baptist Tabernacle Church in Rendon, Texas, where she had voted multiple times before without issue.

On the way, she picked up her niece Joanna, who was also going to vote. Crystal stood in line and gave her name and ID to the poll worker. He told her she wasn't on the list of registered voters, but if she wanted, she could fill out a provisional ballot.

"He said that if I'm in the right place, my vote would count. If I'm not, it wouldn't."

Crystal had lived in the same house for years and didn't have any reason to think she was at the incorrect polling location. She filled out the ballot. Unbeknownst to her, Texas considered Crystal ineligible to vote because, at the time, she was on federal supervised release after serving almost three years in prison for tax fraud. No one ever told her that she wasn't allowed to vote until her federal supervised release was over.

THE TRIAL

Six months later, Crystal was approached by a police officer in the lobby of a building.

"Are you Crystal Mason?" she asked.

The officer informed her that she had a warrant for her arrest for illegal voting. Crystal's first response was that there must be a mistake. She recalls saying, "No, ma'am, I didn't illegally vote. I used my ID."

She was arrested that day.

She also shared that no one had told her that she was unable to vote while on federal supervised release, neither during the time she was in prison nor at any point after.

Ken Mays, who supervised Crystal's probation officer, appeared in court that day. He testified that before Crystal began her three-year supervised release term in August 2016, they had had multiple conversations about the specific conditions of her supervised release.

He admitted to the court that his office had not warned Crystal that she couldn't vote while on federal supervised release, according to the State of Texas. In fact, he testified that it was not a part of standard procedure to share that information. "That's just not something we do," he told the courtroom.

Yet the state contended that despite never being told she couldn't vote, Crystal should have known.

A TEXAS-SIZED OBSESSION

In some ways, Crystal's story is uniquely extreme. In other ways, it's a predictable outcome of an obsession with supposed rampant voter fraud shared by Texas and much of the country.

In April 2019, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton submitted a letter to Congress, responding to a request for documents after Texas made national news for issuing an advisory that some 100,000 non-citizens were illegally registered to vote in Texas and 58,000 of those individuals may have voted illegally in Texas elections. President Trump later tweeted about it, claiming these numbers were "just the tip of the iceberg!"

This list quickly fell apart under closer inspection. Almost immediately, it was revealed that tens of thousands of individuals on the list were naturalized citizens who had been falsely flagged due to a data error. Subsequent litigation brought by the ACLU and partners demonstrated that the vast majority of the list was likely composed of naturalized citizens who were eligible to vote. In fact, the state eventually settled these lawsuits, scrapping the program because of its flawed methodology.

Paxton's letter also claimed that his office had "real, first-person experience showing the threat to election integrity in Texas is real," and cited as proof the "sheer number of prosecutions and convictions secured."

However, as reported by the Huffington Post, a closer look at Paxton's numbers show that the majority of illegal voting cases prosecuted in 2018 ended with the defendant in a prosecution diversion program, a signal that the cases didn't merit consideration or prosecution.

To this day, Crystal, who is Black, feels that her prosecution was politically and racially charged. She brings up the case of Terri Lynn Rote, a white woman in Iowa, who was convicted of voter fraud after purposely trying to cast a ballot for President Trump twice. She received a sentence of two years' probation and a $750 fine. Even more recently, in April 2018, a white, Republican justice of the peace in Tarrant County pled guilty to submitting fake signatures to secure a place on a primary ballot. Sharen Wilson's office, the same office that prosecuted Crystal, agreed to a sentence of five years' probation.

"It was to make an example out of me. It was cruel. [They] actually know that I had no intention of doing anything wrong at all," Crystal says, pointing to these disparities.

THE CONSEQUENCES

The consequences of Texas' obsession were very real for Crystal. Immediately, the life that she had spent years rebuilding, including holding a fulltime job while going to school and starting her own business, was upended. She returned to federal prison for violating the terms of release, leaving behind her three children and four others in her care.

"It was the hardest thing I've done to actually go back to a place that you said you would never go back to. To leave your children again. I wasn't moving forward. I was moving backwards and this wasn't supposed to be happening to me," she recalls.

Karl Dietrich, Crystal's next door neighbor, claimed that on Election Day, he gave Crystal her provisional ballot, swore her to it, and signed off on her ID. As to whether Crystal actually read the language on the ballot, Mr. Dietrich admitted that, "I cannot say with certainty that she read it."

The state's other witness was Jerrod Streibich, a 16-year-old whom Mr. Dietrich had recruited to volunteer at the polling place. He stated that he had initially checked Crystal in and was unable to find her name in the registration lists. It was Streibich's first time volunteering as a poll worker.

At trial, he suggested that he knew Crystal had read all of the language on the provisional ballot because he was sitting four to five feet away from the table she was sitting at and he had "glanced" at her while she was filling out the form.

THE APPEAL

After serving a little over seven months in federal prison, Crystal was released on bail. Up until two weeks ago, she was not allowed to live in her home and instead had to reside in a halfway house an hour or so away.

Crystal is currently appealing her case before the Second Court of Appeals for Fort Worth, Texas. After her criminal trial, Crystal was contacted by the Next Generation Action Network, a social and legal advocacy organization, that helped find three new attorneys to work with her, Alison Grinter, Kim Cole, and Justin Moore. More recently, the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Texas, and Texas Civil Rights Project have joined her legal team. Her appeal rests on several arguments, including that she did not vote because she only cast a provisional ballot that was not counted, that she did not know the state considered her ineligible to vote, and that she received ineffective legal representation at trial. Under Texas law, a provisional ballot is not a vote. Moreover, Texas law does not specify that Crystal's release conditions rendered her ineligible.

Even though she's back at home now, away from the dormitory of the halfway home, the threat of returning to prison or losing her home looms heavy over Crystal and her entire family. Her faith helps her get through the days, along with journaling, a practice she started when she returned to prison, and listening to gospel music as she drives to and from job interviews.

After weeks of searching, Crystal was thrilled to be rehired by the state agency where she had previously worked. It was just the sign she needed.

"To be rehired at the same job after being honest about my story - by the government no less - this truly is rehabilitation," she said.

Two weeks later, abruptly, a manager pulled Crystal aside and told her she was being let go. When she asked why, she was told that as a contract worker, they were not obligated to provide her a reason.

"I didn't break down and give him the satisfaction," Crystal recalls. "I gathered my things and broke down in the car."

She is currently searching for work. Throughout the entire experience, Crystal has leaned on her church, Friendship West Baptist, and her pastor Freddie D. Haynes, who has been a constant source of support.

"In my darkest moments, it was my pastor who was there to pray for me," she says, reflecting on the day that Pastor Haynes drove her to the federal prison to begin her sentence.

Her spirit has also been bolstered by the outpouring of support that reached her when her story first went viral. Almost 40,000 people signed a petition for District Attorney Sharen Wilson to drop all charges. A fundraising campaign to help save Crystal's house from foreclosure has raised $29,000 thus far.

Initially, Crystal thought she'd never vote again until she realized that may be just what Texas wants. While Crystal was in prison, her daughter got a job on Beto O'Rourke's Senate campaign. She remembers video messaging her daughter while she was knocking on doors to get out the vote. Her daughter would say, "Hey, my mom is Crystal Mason, let's do it for her."

That's when she realized: She wasn't going to stay quiet. Crystal is determined to share her story so that people can understand what voter suppression truly looks like in Tarrant County and beyond. She also wants to become an advocate for better education for people with criminal records once they return to society so that people like her aren't set up to fail when they finish their sentences.

By sentencing her, Texas wanted to teach Crystal a lesson - that she didn't have a vote or voice. Here's what she says she learned instead:

"You wanted me to feel fear. You wanted me to run. You wanted me to be scared to educate and teach my kids to continue to vote, to go vote, what my mom instilled in me. Instead of letting it be a crutch, I have let it motivate me now."

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Crystal Mason Thought She Had The Right to Vote. Texas Sentenced Her to Five Years in Prison for Trying.

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The case of a Texas mother is a window into how the myth of voter fraud is being weaponized to suppress the vote.

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She was told she could vote again after felony convictions. Now she’s in prison for trying.

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She was told she could vote again after felony convictions. Now she’s in prison for trying.

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Creative Source
Rhetorical Situation:

Writer: Timothy Bella

Text/subject: This short story talks about a woman who thought she can vote after her felony convictions and ends up in prison

Audience: General US population, Interest in politics

Context: Politics

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Memphis activist Pamela Moses was sentenced to six years and one day in prison this week. Moses, who was convicted of trying to illegally register to vote, was told by officials in 2019 that she had regained her voting rights. They later acknowledged that they had made a mistake. (Youtube/WREG)
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Pamela Moses said she had taken all the steps to restore her voting rights in Tennessee.

Moses, a Black Lives Matter activist and former Democratic mayoral candidate in Memphis, had an extensive record of felony convictions, including a conviction for tampering with evidence that caused her to permanently lose her voting rights in the state. To restore rights that she says she didn't know she had lost when she pleaded guilty, the corrections department and county election commission both signed off on Moses's voter registration application in 2019 certifying that her probation had ended, granting her full voting privileges once again.
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But there was a problem: The officials who signed off on Moses being eligible to vote acknowledged they made an error in saying her probation was over, meaning her voting rights had not been restored. So when the 44-year-old Black woman submitted the certificate as part of her voter registration, she was charged with trying to illegally register to vote.

After she was convicted of the voting error last November, Moses was sentenced this week to six years and one day in prison.

"I relied on the election commission because those are the people who are supposed to know what you're supposed to do," she told WREG before her sentencing. "And I found out that they didn't know."

Her sentencing Monday has been decried by critics as a much harsher penalty than those in other recent voting fraud cases involving conservative White men. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund tweeted that the case captured how "there are two criminal justice systems in America."

"This case is one about the disparity in sentencing and punishment - and one that shouldn't have happened," Bede Anyanwu, her attorney, told The Washington Post on Friday. Anyanwu, who said Moses plans to appeal, added, "It's all very, very disturbing."

Moses has maintained that she thought her voting rights were restored when she received a letter saying as much, noting in court, "I did not falsify anything." Her defense only angered Criminal Court Judge W. Mark Ward, who said she had intentionally deceived probation officials to restore her voting rights.

"You tricked the probation department into giving you documents saying you were off probation," Ward said in court.

Neither Ward nor a spokesperson with the Shelby County District Attorney's Office, which prosecuted Moses's case, immediately responded to requests for comment Friday. Ward said he would consider placing Moses on probation after nine months of her sentence if she maintains good behavior and completes programs while in prison, reported WHBQ.

After Senate Republicans blocked federal voting rights legislation for a fifth time on Jan. 19, voting rights activists are still hopeful something can be done. (Video: Mahlia Posey/The Washington Post)

The Tennessee case is expected to add to rising national tensions surrounding voter suppression and disenfranchisement, Janai Nelson, the associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told MSNBC. Moses has been likened to Black people such as Hervis Rogers and Crystal Mason, who've faced years in prison over mistakes about their voting eligibility.

"It points to everything that is wrong in our democracy," Nelson, who is not involved in the Moses case, told host Rachel Maddow. "It's a confluence of racial discrimination and voter suppression."

Pamela Moses, a Black woman, has been sentenced to six years in prison because of a voting error. Meanwhile, white individuals who are known to have committed blatant voter fraud have only received probation.

There are two criminal justice systems in America. pic.twitter.com/o4UqowdpbF
- Legal Defense Fund (@NAACP_LDF) February 4, 2022

Moses's sentencing comes weeks after the year-long Democratic push for federal voting rights legislation died in the Senate, as Republicans blocked an elections bill for the fifth time in six months and Democrats failed to unite their caucus behind a plan to rewrite the Senate's rules and pass it anyway. The push from Democrats would have restored portions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that were struck down in recent years by the Supreme Court, and would have established new national standards for federal elections, including minimum requirements for early voting, mail-in voting and other methods making it easier to cast ballots.

As former president Donald Trump and his allies have continued to make baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, several notable instances of voter fraud among White male Republican voters from the 2020 presidential election have emerged. Las Vegas GOP voter Donald Kirk Hartle was charged and convicted last year for forging his late wife's name to vote with her ballot, after he alleged that someone else had stolen her ballot. Hartle was sentenced to probation.

Similar instances happened in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where GOP officials and voters admitted to casting ballots for their dead parents - cases in which the men received probation and no more than three days in jail.

Nevada Republican who claimed someone stole dead wife's ballot is charged with voter fraud

The voting case involving Moses, however, was different and complicated, in more ways than one. Moses had 16 previous felony convictions, according to a news release from Shelby County District Attorney Amy Weirich (R).

Anyanwu said some of the counts against Moses came decades earlier, when she was in her 20s, and he said she was forced to plead guilty in some of the cases "given the fact that she is a lady of limited resources."

"She, like some of my clients, plead guilty because they don't have the money to fight these battles," he said.

One of the most serious incidents was when Moses pleaded guilty in 2015 to a 10-count indictment, including perjury and tampering with evidence. She allegedly stalked and harassed a Shelby County judge between February and March 2014 by impersonating a lawyer and notary public in an effort to file a complaint against the judge, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Moses was given an eight-year suspended sentence, and the judge in that case ordered that she serve the time on probation.

Although the charge of tampering with evidence is one of the few felonies in Tennessee that causes someone to permanently lose their voting rights in the state, she told the Guardian last year that no one explained to her that pleading guilty meant she'd be ineligible to vote.

"They never mentioned anything about voting," she told the outlet. "They never mentioned anything about not voting, being able to vote ... none of that."

Moses went on to found a local Black Lives Matter chapter in Memphis and eventually launched a long-shot bid to become the city's mayor in 2019. But it wasn't until she found out she couldn't be on the ballot that she realized she was still on probation and ineligible to vote. After the court confirmed that she was still on probation, Circuit Court Judge Felicia Corbin Johnson said she was "going to allow the criminal court to make an official determination of whether or not Ms. Moses's sentence has been completed and expired," according to WATN.

What happened next changed Moses's life. On Sept. 3, 2019, Tennessee Department of Correction officials filled out an application for Moses to have her rights restored - and it was approved. Staff members from the Shelby County Election Commission also signed off on the application.

Then, the next day, the Department of Correction wrote a letter to the Shelby County Election Commission noting that it had made a mistake in restoring voting rights to Moses. Officials did not offer an explanation for the mistake.

"This attestation was made in error," wrote Lisa Helton, then the acting assistant commissioner for the department.

The Shelby County Election Commission acknowledged the error in an August 2020 letter from Joe Young, the chief deputy administrator of elections, in which officials said Moses was notified that she remained permanently ineligible.

"Very little of this has made any sense whatsoever," Shelby County Election Administrator Linda Phillips told WREG last year. "The fact is she was convicted of a felony which has permanently terminated her right to vote."

But Moses has maintained that no one ever told her that the good news she received in September 2019 was reversed the next day. She refused to take a plea deal for the charges this time because she thought she had done nothing wrong, Anyanwu said. Yet she ended up being convicted last year.

At her sentencing hearing in December, Ward, a 2004 appointee of then-Gov. Phil Bredesen (D), criticized Moses, saying she had "voted six times as a convicted felon" after her 2015 conviction. Character witnesses supporting Moses remarked that "it would be a shame to waste her good traits which can be so beneficial to her family and her community by being in a jail," according to local media.

Anyanwu said Moses was floored when she found out about the six-year sentence. But she remains hopeful that the sentencing could be overturned on appeal, the attorney said. He is hoping her case can return to court by June. Until then, she remains optimistic that her fight isn't done, he said.

"She believes the sentencing was beyond the evidence that was presented," he said.
Mike DeBonis contributed to this report. Read more: Black History Month is not critical race theory, Alabama educator says in response to complaints Ex-officer who killed Laquan McDonald released after less than half his prison sentence Miami officials allow neighborhoods to opt out of protecting fowl intruders - peacocks

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She was told she could vote again after felony convictions. Now she's in prison for trying.

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Pamela Moses was convicted of voter fraud in Tennessee and sentenced to six years in prison, even though officials who signed off on her being eligible to vote acknowledged that they made an error in saying her rights had been restored.

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Creative Source
Rhetorical Situation:

Writer: brennancenter.org

Text/subject: brennacenter talks about how part of the population that are criminals cant vote because of their criminal history

Audience: Interest in politics, US general population

Context: Voting rights

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My First Vote is a compilation of stories from people across the country who voted for the first time in November 2008 after having lost, and then regained, their right to vote following a criminal conviction.

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Summary: Why restoring voting rights to former felons is “one of the key civil right issues of our time”

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Summary: Why restoring voting rights to former felons is “one of the key civil right issues of our time”

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In this article Courtney Connley goes over why criminals should still be able to vote and what they are doing to change that. Over 5 million Americans were previously convicted of a felony, according to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Michael Vick is part of LeBron James' More Than a Vote initiative to fight voter suppression. Prior to Amendment 4, Florida was one of four states where all people with felony convictions were permanently blocked from voting. The law forced former felons to pay all fines and fees associated with their sentence before they could vote, says FRCC's Aden. The average income of these formerly incarcerated residents who registered to vote during this time was nearly $15,000 below that of the average voter in Florida. Micheal Vick had to do a lot of work to get his voting rights back and sense then he partnered with LeBron James to help others too.

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Summary: She was told she could vote again after felony convictions. Now she’s in prison for trying.

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Summary: She was told she could vote again after felony convictions. Now she’s in prison for trying.

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This story talks about a woman named Pamela Moses and how she tried to vote after her felony convictions and ended up in prison for trying. She was sentenced to six years and one day in prison. Officials who signed off on Moses being eligible to vote acknowledged they made an error in saying her probation was over. So when Pamela Moses submitted the certificate as part of her voter registration, she was charged with trying to illegally register to vote. After she was convicted of the voting error last November, Moses was sentenced to six years and one day in prison. she told the WREG "I relied on the election commission because those are the people who are supposed to know what you're supposed to do,". Moses has been likened to Black people like Hervis Rogers and Crystal Mason, who've faced years in prison over mistakes about their voting eligibility.

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Summary: CRYSTAL MASON THOUGHT SHE HAD THE RIGHT TO VOTE. TEXAS SENTENCED HER TO FIVE YEARS IN PRISON FOR TRYING.

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Summary: CRYSTAL MASON THOUGHT SHE HAD THE RIGHT TO VOTE. TEXAS SENTENCED HER TO FIVE YEARS IN PRISON FOR TRYING.

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Crystal Mason is a Texas mother of three and was sentenced to five years in prison for voting while the state considered her ineligible. She put her vote in a provisional ballot when she was on federal supervised release which means a preliminary period of freedom for individuals who have served their full time of incarceration in federal prison. She was told that she wasn't on the list of registered voters but if she wanted she could fill out a provisional ballot. She was then told "That if I'm in the right place, my vote would count.  Six months later she was approached by a police officer in the lobby of a building. She was told she had a warrant for her arrest for illegal voting. When she filled out the ballot she had been focused on filling out the right-hand side of the form, which asks for the voter's personal information.

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Summary: The Missing Factor in the Election Story: Turnout

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Summary: The Missing Factor in the Election Story: Turnout

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This article from Robert Kuttner talks about early voting and how they use it to their advantage. He talks about how early voting has become a Democratic habit and that Republicans are more likely to vote on Election Day. As of October 30 early voting for democrats in 2022 was extremely earlier compared to 2018. In the five states that report early voting by gender, 54.4 percent of the early voters have been women. Tom Bonier of TargetSmart: Women's requests for vote-by-mail ballots far exceed those by men. Turnout will also influence the very close Senate races that will determine which party keeps control. Anna Greenberg believes that 2022 could well be more like 2018 in terms of turnout, especially women's turnout.

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In this short story brennancenter talks about how former criminals can't vote because of their criminal history. 5.3 million American citizens are not allowed to vote because of a criminal conviction. 35 states continue to deny the right to vote to people who are no longer in prison. Brennan Center and others have found that many elections officials are unclear on the rules in their states for reinstating voting rights. They also give testimonies of people who weren't able to vote. Some people felt they had power when they had the right to vote, but when that was taken they didn’t even feel like a citizen.