A Biden-appointed Florida judge dismissed federal charges against a Jamaican national who voted in 2020, holding that Congress lacks power to bar noncitizens from federal elections, a ruling critics say guts long-standing election safeguards.
U.S. District Judge David Leibowitz of the Southern District of Florida threw out the case against Chelsea Cox in a 31-page decision, ruling that a 1996 federal law criminalizing noncitizen voting in federal elections is unconstitutional as applied to her.
Fox News reported that Leibowitz held the Constitution gives states, not Congress, the general power to set voter qualifications in federal elections, leaving the federal government unable to keep prosecuting Cox on those charges.
Cox, originally from Jamaica, cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election despite not being a U.S. citizen. The New York Post reported she used a fraudulent birth certificate to register and voted in federal elections from 2012 through 2020, with only the 2020 vote falling inside the statute of limitations. The case arose in Broward County.
The ruling lands amid a broader Trump administration push to stop noncitizens from voting, including federal prosecutions and efforts to verify citizenship on state voter rolls. That drive has already produced legal fights with Democratic-led states and voting-rights groups.
Justice Department prosecutors have charged at least 60 people with noncitizen voting since President Trump returned to office in January 2025. Leibowitz’s decision applies only to Cox’s case and does not bind other courts, yet it undercuts a core tool the administration has used to enforce the law.
Leibowitz wrote that the Constitution assigns voter qualifications to the states.
In the ruling he stated:
"The Constitution commits to the States, and the States alone, the general power to set voter qualifications in federal elections."
He added:
"This is clear from both the text of the document and the debates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787."
The judge rejected the government’s claim that Congress’s broad immigration powers or the Elections Clause authorized the ban. He said those powers are not “blank checks” that can override the states’ authority over who may vote, and he found the 1996 statute created a federal voter qualification rather than a pure regulation of election procedures or fraud.
In a separate passage quoted in related coverage, Leibowitz put the point bluntly:
"When you’re prosecuted based on a law that Congress did not have the authority to pass, the prosecution cannot stand."
He also noted Florida retains the power to prosecute the same conduct under state law. “Can the State of Florida prohibit and punish the exact conduct Defendant Cox allegedly engaged in here? This has already been decided elsewhere and is not addressed here: Florida can and does,” he wrote.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, co-author of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, did not speak evasively on X.
"This insane ruling will certainly be overturned. But it gives the game away: Democrats pretend we don’t need the SAVE Act because non-citizen voting is already illegal... while activist judges try to destroy laws banning non-citizens from voting!"
Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom, told reporters the opinion is “patently wrong” and will most likely be “squashed” by the 11th Circuit. He argued Leibowitz ignored Article I, Section 8, which gives Congress full authority over naturalization and, in his view, the power to keep noncitizens out of the democratic process.
Von Spakovsky pointed to the 2011 Bluman v. FEC decision written by then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh and later summarily affirmed by the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh wrote that government “may exclude foreign citizens from activities that are part of the democratic self-regulation in the United States,” including voting, jury service, and certain public jobs.
Anhishek Kambil, a partner at Holtzman Vogel, said the judge’s reading “kind of made everything a mess” and that he would be surprised if the government did not win on appeal. He cited Oregon v. Mitchell, in which the Supreme Court recognized federal authority to set certain voter qualifications, such as the voting age in federal elections.
Federal prosecutors had argued the opposite in court filings, writing that “Foreign interference in elections is clearly within the purview of Congress.”
James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, framed the stakes in plain terms after the Breitbart report on the decision: a Biden-appointed judge had turned a long-standing ban into what critics now mock as newly protected activity.
President Joe Biden nominated Leibowitz in 2024. The Senate confirmed him 64-33 in a bipartisan vote; then-Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida voted yes. JD Vance’s rise as Trump’s heir has kept national attention on judges who reshape election rules from the bench, and this is already described as Leibowitz’s most politically consequential decision to date.
The statute at issue is a provision of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, also identified as 18 U.S.C. § 611, which made it a federal crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. Leibowitz held Congress lacked authority to enact that bar as a voter qualification.
Reuters previously reported that more than 30,000 noncitizens had been found on U.S. voter rolls. The Trump administration has pressed citizenship checks, including through DHS and State Department channels tied to passport and mail-ballot monitoring. Democratic resistance and court fights have slowed those efforts.
Lee’s SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register in federal elections, remains stalled in the Senate and is unlikely to pass before the midterms. That gridlock is exactly why prosecutors leaned on the 1996 criminal statute, and why a single district-court ruling now matters.
Legal observers expect the Justice Department to appeal. Von Spakovsky and Kambil both forecast a reversal, either at the 11th Circuit or beyond. Until then, the federal case against Cox is over.
Florida prosecutors still have a clear lane. Leibowitz himself underscored that the state can punish the conduct he said the federal government cannot reach under this statute. Whether state charges follow will test whether local officials treat noncitizen voting as a real offense or a paperwork dispute.
The administration’s wider docket, dozens of other noncitizen-voting cases since early 2025, continues. One Florida opinion does not erase those indictments. It does hand defense lawyers a new template and forces the government to defend Congress’s power from first principles.
Election integrity has become a central test of whether institutions will enforce basic citizenship rules or invent novel limits on them. Trump’s push to elevate Vance rests in part on delivering results voters can see on borders and ballots, not theoretical arguments that leave loopholes intact.
Voters already face enough confusion without federal judges declaring that a 30-year-old ban on noncitizen voting exceeds Congress’s reach. Senate rivalries heading into 2028 will not settle the constitutional question; appellate courts will.
Common-sense rules still command broad public support: citizens vote, noncitizens do not. Vance’s everyday focus on ordinary Americans tracks that expectation far better than a ruling that treats a clear federal prohibition as optional.
If higher courts let this stand, Congress’s ability to protect federal elections from foreign and noncitizen participation shrinks to whatever each state happens to allow. That is not federalism. It is a retreat from a basic duty.
Citizenship still has to mean something at the ballot box, and judges who strip Congress of the power to say so will face the appeals they invited.
