Chelsea Michelle Ann Cox, a Jamaican national living in Broward County, Florida, voted in the 2020 election. She wasn't a U.S. citizen. She was prosecuted under a federal law that has been on the books since 1996. And last week, a federal judge threw the whole case out — not because Cox didn't vote illegally, but because he decided the law itself was unconstitutional.
The judge was appointed by Joe Biden in 2024. The midterm election is less than a month away.
U.S. District Judge David Leibowitz, confirmed to the Southern District of Florida on a 64-33 Senate vote, issued a 31-page opinion declaring that 18 U.S.C. § 611 — the section of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 that makes it a federal crime for non-citizens to vote in federal elections — exceeds Congress's authority. His reasoning: "The Constitution commits to the States, and the States alone, the general power to set voter qualifications in federal elections."
Read that ruling carefully. It doesn't say Cox didn't break the law. It says Congress had no right to pass the law in the first place.
"When you're prosecuted based on a law that Congress did not have the authority to pass, the prosecution cannot stand," Leibowitz wrote. He leaned on the 1970 Supreme Court decision in Oregon v. Mitchell, which held that Congress cannot dictate voter qualifications in state and local elections. Leibowitz extended that logic to federal elections — a leap that effectively strips the federal government of any role in preventing non-citizens from casting ballots.
James Percival, General Counsel at the Department of Homeland Security under President Trump, didn't mince the implications. "A Biden appointed judge in Florida says that federal bans on noncitizen voting are unconstitutional," Percival wrote. "The thing that never happens is now 'constitutionally protected activity!'"
That last line lands harder than it looks. For years, the standard Democratic rebuttal to election integrity concerns has been that non-citizen voting simply doesn't happen in meaningful numbers — so laws preventing it are unnecessary at best, racist at worst. Leibowitz's ruling doesn't bother with the "it doesn't happen" defense. It skips straight to "and you can't stop it even if it does."
The timing is worth sitting with. This isn't a ruling handed down in the middle of a quiet judicial term. It dropped on October 3rd, with ballots already being printed, early voting windows opening, and registration deadlines passing across the country. The 1996 law stood unchallenged through seven election cycles. Now, four weeks before voters head to the polls, a judge Biden put on the bench in 2024 decided it was unconstitutional all along.
Sen. Mike Lee flagged the ruling as part of a broader pattern of judicial intervention timed to election windows — decisions that create maximum confusion with minimum time for legislative or appellate response. By the time a higher court can weigh in, the election will be over.
The federal government has passed exactly one law explicitly criminalizing non-citizen voting in federal elections. It lasted thirty years. A single Biden-appointed district judge just erased it in 31 pages, with the election already underway.
