“It’s weird that I’m here.”
From the Tarrant County Jail, Rosa Maria Ortega said her sentence of eight years for being convicted of voter fraud is ridiculous.
“I really think it would be two years, three years at most. I didn’t really think it was going to be eight. That was too much,” Ortega said.
Prosecutors say Ortega lied on Dallas County voters registration forms by saying she was a U.S. citizen and then voting five times over 10 years, including the 2012 general election and again in 2014.
Both times she said she cast a ballot for the Republican candidate.
When she tried to register in Tarrant County, she was told she couldn’t because she wasn’t a citizen.
She and her attorney say there was a plea deal offered, but that was yanked right before the trial.
“It was just against me, against me, against me. Just to be an example. That’s all it is.”
Ortega said her mother brought her into the country when she was a child and told her she was a legal citizen — and that’s what she always thought.
She said she didn’t know the difference between citizen and resident.
“And the next thing you [know], it’s like, everything is like, ‘you did know, you did know.’ I didn’t know, I didn’t know because if I did know, I would have voted in Tarrant County, and I didn’t vote in Tarrant County.”
Ortega, a mother of four, said she misses her family and hopes other Latinos vote with caution.
As for her eight-year sentence, she blames race and politics.
“We know that they’re wrong because they could have did this to somebody else that really did something wrong, that really committed a crime. My record was clean and to be having a felony second-degree with eight years, that’s impossible. That’s just not fair. It’s just not fair.”