God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State

by Lawrence Wright

In the midst of all this, Rosa Maria Ortega, a thirty-seven-year-old mother of four with a sixth-grade education, in Fort Worth, was found to have registered to vote illegally. She had lived in the United States since she was an infant and was a legal resident, entitled to serve in the military and required to pay taxes. She assumed she could also vote, and had done so previously, in 2012 and 2014. The local prosecutor decided to make an example of her. She was sentenced to eight years in prison.

“They were not so much progressives as they were populists,” he replied. “And populists think the system’s rigged against them. They went from being economic populists, who thought the system was rigged against the little guy, to social and conservative populists, who thought that government was the problem.”