Miami Judge Finds Federal Noncitizen Voting Ban Unconstitutional in Single Case
A federal judge in Miami has ruled the federal ban on voting by noncitizens unconstitutional and dismissed the case against Chelsea Cox.
Cox, a Florida resident originally from Jamaica, had been charged in October 2025 with illegally voting in the 2020 presidential election, according to Al Jazeera.
Prosecutors alleged a long sequence of immigration and identity violations. They said Cox entered the United States as a tourist in 1999 and overstayed her visa. In 2012, she allegedly used a fraudulent birth certificate from the U.S. Virgin Islands to obtain a Florida driver's licence and register to vote. That registration led to the 2020 ballot at issue in the federal charge.
U.S. District Judge David Leibowitz held that under the U.S. Constitution, only individual states and not Congress have the authority to set voter qualifications. He wrote that Florida, not the Department of Justice, should prosecute Cox because Florida already has its own laws against the alleged conduct.
The statute makes it illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. Enacted in 1996, it provides for fines of up to $100,000 or imprisonment for up to a year, as reported by The Daily Record. Leibowitz was nominated to the bench by former Democratic President Joe Biden.
The ruling is limited to Cox. It applies only to her case and does not bind judges elsewhere. The Department of Justice has charged at least 60 people with voting by noncitizens since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025. About 45 similar federal cases remain pending nationwide, and at least four other defendants have raised the same constitutional challenge as Cox. An earlier account identified five defendants across cases in Miami and Wisconsin pursuing that challenge, according to Reuters. Reuters published its report on the Leibowitz ruling on Oct. 1, 2026.
The broader context here is a jurisdictional dispute over who controls voter eligibility in federal elections. Both federal and Florida law prohibit the underlying conduct. The contested point is whether Congress may attach federal criminal penalties to a qualification decision that, under Leibowitz's reading, belongs to the states, much as a landlord sets house rules while a city tries to fine violators.
Looking at what this means for the docket, trial judges in other districts may consider the Miami reasoning but are not required to follow it. If additional courts adopt the states-only theory, federal prosecutors could need to rely on state referrals or reframe cases around identity fraud rather than the voting act itself. If appellate courts reject the theory, the existing federal enforcement approach continues. With dozens of pending cases presenting the identical question, further judicial testing is highly likely.
