Chelsea Michelle Ann Cox, a Jamaican national living in Broward County, Florida, voted in the 2020 election. She is not an American citizen. She was prosecuted under a 1996 federal law — 18 U.S.C. § 611 — that makes it a crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, punishable by up to one year in prison.

A Biden-appointed judge just ruled that law is unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge David Leibowitz, confirmed to the Southern District of Florida in 2024 on a 64-33 Senate vote, issued a 31-page opinion striking down the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act's voting prohibition. His reasoning: "The Constitution commits to the States, and the States alone, the general power to set voter qualifications in federal elections." Congress, in Leibowitz's reading, never had the authority to pass the ban 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.

The ruling dropped the same week a Minnesota grand jury handed down indictments against noncitizens for voting illegally. One courtroom is prosecuting foreigners for casting ballots they had no right to cast. Another courtroom, 1,800 miles south, just declared that the federal law making it a crime doesn't exist.

Leibowitz hung his opinion on the 1970 Supreme Court decision Oregon v. Mitchell, arguing that voter qualifications are a state matter under Articles I and II of the Constitution and the 17th Amendment. The problem with that framework is that it treats a criminal prohibition on fraud as a "voter qualification." Telling noncitizens they cannot vote isn't setting a qualification — it's enforcing the baseline distinction between citizen and non-citizen that every election in American history has presumed.

James Percival, General Counsel at the Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration, framed it precisely: "A Biden appointed judge in Florida says that federal bans on noncitizen voting are unconstitutional. The thing that never happens is now 'constitutionally protected activity!'"

That last phrase deserves attention. For years, the official line from Democrats has been that noncitizen voting doesn't happen in meaningful numbers — it's a myth, a right-wing fever dream, a solution in search of a problem. Now a federal judge has moved the goalpost from "it doesn't happen" to "the federal government can't stop it." The argument evolved in exactly the direction skeptics predicted.

Sen. Mike Lee denounced the ruling and predicted it would be overturned. He may be right — the opinion conflicts with decades of federal enforcement and will almost certainly face appeal. But the damage of the ruling isn't only legal. It sends a signal: a sitting federal judge, confirmed with bipartisan votes — Marco Rubio voted for him, 64-33 — believes Congress lacks the power to criminalize foreign nationals casting ballots in American elections.