Rosa Maria Ortega voted for Republican Ken Paxton for Texas attorney general in 2014. Now, as she sits behind a plate glass window Monday with heavy eyes and wearing a tan Tarrant County Jail jumpsuit, she’s crushed that Paxton and others can celebrate her incarceration as sending a message about illegal voting. Ortega, 37, a permanent resident who arrived in Texas as an infant and has four children, all U.S. citizens, was charged with two counts of illegal voting for voting illegally in elections in 2012 and 2014. On Thursday, a Tarrant County jury handed down a sentence of eight years in prison and a $5,000 fine for each count. After serving her sentence, she will likely face deportation. She believes she is wrongly being used as an example of voter fraud. “I thought I was doing something right for my country. When they gave me the sentence they just broke my heart, and they didn’t just break my heart, but I already knew my family was going to be broken, my kids especially,” Ortega said Monday during an interview at the jail, where she will remain for about a month until being transported to a Texas Department of Criminal Justice facility. “To me, it’s like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe this. I just can’t.’ ”
As a green-card holder, Ortega says she never thought she couldn’t vote. While a resident of Dallas County, Ortega received a voter card after providing a valid driver’s license and Social Security card and being approved through the state process, according to Toni Pippins-Poole, the Dallas County elections administrator. In 2012, she voted for Mitt Romney for president; two years later she voted for Paxton for attorney general, according to her attorney, Clark Birdsall.
Upon moving to Tarrant County, she again registered to vote, but her application was rejected because she checked the box indicating she is a non-citizen. Confused, she told election officials she had previously voted in Dallas County. She received another application and this time marked the box affirming that she is a citizen.
That raised red flags, and she was arrested for voter fraud. “She wasn’t trying to topple the government. She was voting Republican for who she thought would do a good job,” Birdsall said. “Even if the government’s case is exactly right that she did it when she knew she wasn’t supposed to, goodness gracious, 50 percent of our population couldn’t be bothered to get off the couch and vote in our last presidential election.”
Full Article: Texas illegal voter ‘can’t believe’ she got 8 years in prison | The Star-Telegram.
