A Biden-appointed Florida judge wiped out federal charges against a noncitizen who voted in 2020, holding that Congress has no power to ban noncitizens from federal elections, a ruling critics say guts a core election safeguard.
U.S. District Judge David Leibowitz of the Southern District of Florida dismissed the case against Chelsea Cox in a 31-page opinion that treats a long-standing federal ban as unconstitutional as applied to her. Cox, originally from Jamaica and not a U.S. citizen, cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election.
Fox News Digital reported that Leibowitz concluded the Constitution leaves voter qualifications to the states, not to Congress, and that the 1996 criminal provision at issue crossed that line.
The decision lands as the Trump administration has stepped up federal prosecutions and citizenship checks on voter rolls. It also arrives while the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, the SAVE Act, remains stalled in the Senate.
Conservative critics called the ruling a gift to open-borders politics. Election lawyers said higher courts are likely to reverse it.
Leibowitz held that the Constitution assigns to the states the general power to decide who qualifies as a voter in federal elections. He rooted that conclusion in the text and in the 1787 Constitutional Convention debates.
"The Constitution commits to the States, and the States alone, the general power to set voter qualifications in federal elections."
He added that the point is clear from both the document’s text and the founding debates.
"This is clear from both the text of the document and the debates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787."
The statute at issue comes from the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. It makes noncitizen voting in federal elections a federal crime. Leibowitz said that law did not merely police election procedures or fraud. In his view, it created a federal voter qualification by deciding who could cast a ballot.
Prosecutors argued Congress has broad power over immigration and noncitizens, and pointed to the Elections Clause. Leibowitz rejected both paths. He acknowledged Congress has “broad, undoubted power” over immigration, then said those powers are not “blank checks” that erase the states’ assigned role on voter qualifications.
Florida can still bring its own charges. The federal case against Cox cannot continue under the dismissed counts.
Cox lived in Florida and voted in Broward County. The New York Post reported she used a fraudulent birth certificate to obtain a Florida license and voted in federal elections from 2012 through 2020, though only the 2020 vote fell inside the federal statute of limitations.
Leibowitz noted that Florida itself can prohibit and punish the same conduct. “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.
Her attorney, Bruce Udolf, urged prosecutors to drop the matter. “This is a situation that cries out for discretion by government officials, and they’d be well-advised to walk away from this without further reprisal against her,” Udolf said.
The Justice Department has charged at least 60 people with noncitizen voting since President Trump returned to office in January 2025. The Leibowitz order binds only this case. It still undercuts a central tool in that enforcement push.
Voters who follow the law expect citizenship to mean something at the ballot box. A federal bench that strips Congress of the power to enforce that line invites the opposite result.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, co-author of the SAVE Act, did not mince words on X. He said the decision will be overturned and argued it exposes Democratic resistance to stronger citizenship checks.
"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!"
Lee’s post also pointed to reporting that more than 30,000 noncitizens have been found on U.S. voter rolls. The SAVE Act would require proof of citizenship for federal voter registration. It remains stalled in the Senate and is unlikely to pass before the midterms.
That fight sits inside a larger argument about election rules, borders, and whether federal law still backs citizenship as a basic condition of the franchise, the same terrain JD Vance has occupied in national GOP primary polling as conservatives weigh 2028.
Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow with Advancing American Freedom, told Fox News Digital the opinion is “patently wrong” and will most likely be “squashed” at the 11th Circuit.
"It is true that states have the constitutional authority to set the qualifications of citizens who are eligible as voters in federal elections. But he ignores the fact that in Article I, Section 8, Congress is given 100% authority over naturalization."
That naturalization power, von Spakovsky said, gives the federal government authority to ban aliens from voting or from other parts of the democratic process.
Von Spakovsky and other critics pointed to Bluman v. FEC, a 2011 decision written by then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh and later summarily affirmed by the Supreme Court. Bluman involved foreign nationals’ campaign spending, not a criminal voting prosecution. Its reasoning still cut against Leibowitz’s approach.
"The Supreme Court has long held that the government (federal, state, local) may exclude foreign citizens from activities that are part of the democratic self-regulation in the United States."
Kavanaugh continued that the Court has allowed government to bar aliens from voting, serving as jurors, working as police or probation officers, or teaching in public schools.
Breitbart News reported that prosecutors also cited Oregon v. Mitchell, the 1970 Supreme Court case upholding federal power to set the voting age in federal elections, itself a voter qualification. Leibowitz still found the 1996 ban exceeded Congress’s authority under Article I, Article II, and the 17th Amendment.
“When you’re prosecuted based on a law that Congress did not have the authority to pass, the prosecution cannot stand,” he wrote.
Anhishek Kambil, a partner at Holtzman Vogel, said the reading “made everything a mess” and that he would be “surprised” if the government did not prevail on appeal. James Percival mocked the logic in blunt terms: a Biden-appointed Florida judge had turned “the thing that never happens” into “constitutionally protected activity.”
Election integrity remains a live fight for conservatives who want citizenship verified, not assumed. It is also the kind of institutional test that surfaces whenever GOP senators size up the 2028 field and argue about who will defend basic rules.
President Joe Biden nominated Leibowitz in 2024. The Senate confirmed him 64-33 in a bipartisan vote. Then-Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., voted yes.
That confirmation math matters to voters who watch judges reshape election law after the fact. A narrow criminal case against one noncitizen voter became a vehicle for striking a national ban. The order does not erase Florida’s authority. It does tell federal prosecutors their main statute cannot be used against Cox.
Trump administration officials have pressed citizenship verification on state rolls, passport-record sharing, and related enforcement. Those efforts have drawn lawsuits from Democratic-led states and voting-rights groups. Leibowitz’s opinion hands those challengers a district-court line they will try to widen.
Common-sense voters do not need a seminar to grasp the stakes. If Congress cannot criminalize noncitizen voting in federal elections, the federal backstop disappears and enforcement falls entirely to the states, including states that refuse to treat the problem as real.
That is why the SAVE Act fight keeps returning, and why rulings like this one feed the larger debate over radical process games versus ordinary rules of citizenship. It is the same divide Republican delegates have cheered in early 2028 signaling when they demand leaders who will not blur the line.
Cox’s federal charges are gone. The constitutional claim is now teed up for the 11th Circuit. Von Spakovsky expects a reversal. Kambil expects the government to win on appeal. Lee called the outcome a preview of the argument Democrats make while blocking proof-of-citizenship legislation.
A republic that cannot say noncitizens may not vote in its national elections is not protecting a right. It is abandoning a boundary. Higher courts should put that boundary back.
