Court upholds conviction of woman sentenced
to 8 years in prison for voter fraud!
An appeals court upheld last year’s conviction of a
Texas
woman who officials said voted illegally multiple times,
Attorney
General Ken Paxton said Tuesday. Rosa
Maria
Ortega, a green card holder, is a permanent resident
who lives in the
Dallas area. On voter registration forms, Ortega
marked she was a U.S.
citizen – allowing her to vote “illegally
for more than 10 years,” Paxton’s office said.
The mother of four was sentenced to eight years
in prison with
parole eligibility in less than one year. She was also
fined $5,000.
The Texas 2nd Court of Appeals upheld the conviction
Tuesday.
The attorney general’s office said it had offered Ortega a
lesser
punishment so she could avoid prison – just two years of
community supervision – but she declined and chose a jury trial instead.
“This
case underscores the importance that Texans place on the institution of
voting and the hallowed principle that every citizen’s vote must
count,” Paxton said in a statement. “We will hold those accountable who
falsely claim eligibility and purposely subvert the election process in
Texas.”
Ortega had said she was confused by the voter registration
forms and made a mistake when she marked that she was a U.S. citizen on
the paperwork.
“All my life since I worked, I always on my
knowledge thought I was a U.S. citizen because I never knew the
difference of U.S. citizen and U.S. resident,” Ortega said, according to KDFW-TV. “And the point is if I knew, everything would’ve been the correct way.” Clark Birdsall,
her attorney, told The Washington Post the only options on the
form was “citizen” or “noncitizen.”

“She
doesn’t know. She’s got this [green] card that says ‘resident’ on it,
so she doesn’t mark that she’s not a citizen. She had no ulterior motive
beyond what she thought, mistakenly, was her civic duty,” Birdsall
said.
But prosecutors didn’t buy the defense. They said she
initially marked she was not a U.S. citizen on a voter registration form
when she moved from Dallas County to Tarrant County in 2014 and was
informed she would not be eligible to vote. When she applied again, she
indicated she was a U.S. citizen, according to Paxton’s office.
No comments:
Post a Comment