Georgia Republican Party official Brian Pritchard has spent the last several years ranting on his talk show that Democrats nefariously stole the 2020 election from poor, sweet, innocent Donald Trump.
He spent this week, however, getting convicted of nine counts of voter fraud.
Pritchard had pleaded guilty in 1996 to felony fraud and theft over $38,000 in forged checks related to his construction business. He didn’t go to prison, but he was required to pay all of that money back in restitution and he was sentenced to probation, which at one point was extended until 2011. In Georgia, felons are not allowed to vote while still on probation, but he voted nine times between 2008 and 2010 anyway.
Truly, there are few crimes that adhere as faithfully to the “they who smelt it, dealt it” doctrine as voter fraud. For whatever reason, it does seem as though we see a whole lot more stories about Republicans doing voter fraud than we do about Democrats. It’s possible that they just receive more attention, but it also seems possible that telling people over and over again that their opponents are doing tons of voter fraud that they are not actually doing might make them think that they ought to do a little of their own to even things out.
Aside from 2020 election conspiracies, another thing Pritchard apparently likes to talk about is what a brilliant businessman he is, which the judge cited as a reason for why he surely must have known that he was voting illegally.
The judge found Pritchard’s explanations to be lacking in credibility, noting that “to accept that the Respondent’s grasp of legal proceedings was so unsophisticated that he did not understand the basic terms of his probation in 1996 … this Court would need to disregard (Pritchard’s) self-described experience as a businessman handling complex projects as well as million-dollar contracts and budgets.”
“Based on the above, and upon careful consideration of the evidence in its totality the Court does not find the explanations credible or convincing,” Boggs wrote. “At the very least, even if the Court accepts he did not know about his felony sentences, the record before this Court demonstrates that he should have known.”
Pritchard was ordered to pay $5,000 fine — $500 for each count and $500 for registering to vote illegally — and $375.14 for what it cost the court to have him investigated.
This is a relatively reasonable, if not overly punitive, judgment, even for someone I find personally objectionable. I do not think that a felony should keep anyone from voting in the first place and $5,375.14 could bankrupt a whole lot of people. I certainly don’t think it should ever result in prison time.
But let’s take a look at how this particular story popped up in my Reddit feed this morning, shall we?
By sheer coincidence, the top two stories were this and one about Crystal Mason, a Black woman from Texas who attempted to vote once while still on supervised release for a tax felony. She didn’t even actually vote! She tried to cast a provisional ballot, was rejected, was found guilty of voter fraud in 2018 after a trial that lasted just a few hours, and was then sentenced to five years in a federal prison for the crime. Five years! In prison! For trying and failing to vote!
Via The Guardian:
In 2022, Texas’s highest criminal court told a lower appellate court it had to reconsider a ruling upholding Mason’s conviction. On Thursday, that court said there was not sufficient evidence Mason knew she was ineligible to vote.
Justice Wade Birdwell wrote for the court in its Thursday ruling: “We conclude that the quantum of the evidence presented in this case is insufficient to support the conclusion that Mason actually realized that she voted knowing that she was ineligible to do so and, therefore, insufficient to support her conviction for illegal voting.”
It’s worth noting that out of 4,000 provisional ballots cast in that particular election, 3,990 of them were rejected for one reason or another. But Crystal Mason was the only one of these people charged with a crime.
Thankfully, Mason didn’t serve that ridiculous five-year sentence, as she was held on an appeal bond instead. That doesn’t mean her life hasn’t been upended by the seven-year ordeal.
“Although I’ve cried for seven years straight, seven nights a week … I’ve also prayed for seven years straight, seven nights a week. Prayed that I would remain a free black woman,” she said in a statement.
“I am overjoyed to see my faith rewarded today,” she added.
What’s galling here is the disparity between how Mason, a Black woman, was treated and sentenced and how Pritchard, a white conservative man, was treated and sentenced, relative to the actual “crimes” for which they were convicted. Sure, these are two different states, but they’re not all that different.
It’s hard to imagine that Pritchard would get the same sentence as Mason initially did were he in Texas, a state where six out of seven law enforcement agencies freely report stopping and searching people of color more than white people. The same state where, need I remind you, a District Attorney once had an expert testify that simply being Black made a man more deserving of the death penalty.
It also seems unlikely that Mason would have been sentenced as lightly as Pritchard in Georgia, which has certainly had its own problems with racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
Again, I do not actually think that what either of these people did should be a crime in the first place, but if something is going to be a crime, it sure as hell shouldn’t be more of one based on what one’s race is.
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