A Biden-appointed federal judge has dismissed a criminal charge against a noncitizen accused of voting in the 2020 presidential election, ruling that Congress lacked constitutional authority to impose the federal ban in her case.
The Justice Department moved immediately to appeal.
The ruling does not create a general right for noncitizens to vote, and Florida’s citizenship requirement remains in force.
It does strike at the federal statute Congress enacted to prohibit noncitizens from voting in federal elections — and it is certain to intensify the national fight over election integrity.
U.S. District Judge David S. Leibowitz issued the 31-page order on Thursday in the Southern District of Florida.
Leibowitz was nominated by President Joe Biden and confirmed in 2024.
The defendant, Chelsea Cox, is a Jamaican national and Florida resident. Federal prosecutors alleged that she knowingly cast a ballot in Broward County in the 2020 presidential election despite not being a U.S. citizen.
According to CBS News, Leibowitz dismissed the misdemeanor count brought under 18 U.S.C. § 611, concluding that the Constitution gives states — not Congress — the authority to set voter qualifications.
The judge did not find that Cox was a citizen, declare her eligible to vote or invalidate Florida’s rule limiting voting to citizens. His order addressed the federal law as applied to her case.
The government’s separate false-claim-of-citizenship statute was not at issue.
Cox was charged in October 2025. Prosecutors alleged in court papers that she had overstayed a tourist visa, obtained a Florida driver’s license using a fraudulent U.S. Virgin Islands birth certificate and cast ballots in multiple federal elections beginning in 2012.
Her attorneys moved to dismiss the charge earlier this year, arguing that Congress had intruded on a power reserved to the states. Leibowitz also invited former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement to submit an independent brief; Clement concluded that Congress likely exceeded its constitutional bounds when it enacted the law.
That distinction matters legally. It will not make the result any less alarming to Americans who expect federal elections to be restricted to American citizens.
The constitutional dispute now heads toward the Eleventh Circuit. The Justice Department filed its notice of appeal on Friday, just one day after the order.
Fox News notes that Leibowitz appears to be the first federal judge to hold the statute unconstitutional. The case therefore gives the Eleventh Circuit a question no appellate court has squarely answered under this law.
That makes the appeal more than a dispute about one misdemeanor case. It is a test of whether Congress can establish a nationwide citizenship floor for participation in federal elections and enforce that rule through criminal law.
The Constitution gives states the power to set voter qualifications, but it also grants Congress authority over aspects of federal election procedure. The dispute turns on whether banning noncitizen participation protects a federal election or impermissibly rewrites a state’s voter qualifications.
Leibowitz’s order draws a hard line between those two powers. The government will now argue that the line was drawn in the wrong place and that the Constitution cannot require federal prosecutors to stand down when a noncitizen allegedly casts a ballot for federal office.
Federal prosecutors had argued that the national government plays a substantial constitutional role in federal elections and must be able to protect federal citizenship. They maintained that the United States has the right to exclude noncitizens from choosing federal officials.
Leibowitz rejected that position, finding the government’s Supreme Court support too weak to overcome the Constitution’s allocation of voter-qualification power to the states. The Justice Department’s appeal will ask the Eleventh Circuit to reverse that reading before it becomes a roadmap for challenges elsewhere.
One thing should not be lost in the legal argument: the ballot in question was for president. Americans do not experience presidential elections as fifty unrelated state contests.
The office exercises national power, and the public has an obvious national interest in ensuring that only citizens choose who holds it.
Critics are right to be outraged, but the cleanest answer is not to pretend the order says more than it does. It is to defeat the order on appeal, preserve the citizenship requirement in federal law and remove any ambiguity before the next election.
President Trump’s Justice Department has already taken the first necessary step. Now the Eleventh Circuit will decide whether one district judge can leave Congress powerless to enforce the most basic qualification for voting in a federal election: being an American citizen.
Photo: David Seymour Leibowitz at his 2023 nomination hearing, from the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Color and landscape framing enhanced.
This is a Guest Post from our friends over at 100 Percent Fed Up. View the original article here.
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[ H/T WLT Report ]
