By Tom Hals
Oct 1 (Reuters) – A US judge dismissed a federal case on Thursday that accused a Jamaican national of illegally voting, finding the law criminalizing noncitizen voting was unconstitutional and delivering a blow to the Trump administration’s campaign against alleged election fraud.
The ruling by Miami-based US District Judge David Leibowitz applies only to the case of Florida resident Chelsea Cox, who was charged in October 2025 with illegally voting in the 2020 election. It is not binding for judges in other cases.
It marks a setback for President Donald Trump’s administration on noncitizen voting, a cornerstone of its push to highlight alleged election fraud ahead of November’s midterm elections. Republicans are fighting to retain majorities in both houses of Congress.
The Justice Department has charged at least 60 people with noncitizen voting since Trump returned to office in January 2025.
The ruling by Leibowitz, who was nominated by Democratic President Joe Biden, appears to be the first time a federal court has found the 1996 law a violation of the US Constitution.
Leibowitz wrote that under the US Constitution only states can set voter qualifications, not Congress. Every state requires US citizenship to vote, and Leibowitz said it was up to Florida, not the Department of Justice, to prosecute her for violating that requirement.
“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,” Leibowitz wrote.
Trump, who falsely claims that fraud cost him the 2020 election, has said stricter enforcement of documented citizenship is needed for election integrity. His critics say the administration’s highly publicized crackdown on noncitizen voting exaggerates a rare problem and could undermine confidence in election results.
Neither the White House nor the Justice Department immediately responded to requests for comment.
In a court filing, the Justice Department had said Congress, not the states, was best-equipped to handle immigration and foreign affairs.
“Foreign interference in elections is clearly within the purview of Congress,” federal prosecutors wrote.
OTHER DEFENDANTS HAVE CHALLENGED LAW
Cox’s attorney Bruce Udolf welcomed the ruling. “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,” he said.
Cox entered the United States as a tourist in 1999 and remained after her visa expired the next year, according to a court filing by the government. She used a fraudulent US Virgin Islands birth certificate to obtain a Florida driver’s license and used those documents to register to vote in 2012.
Records show she voted in federal elections from 2012 to 2020, but only the 2020 election was within the statute of limitations.
There are about 45 pending noncitizen voting cases around the country and at least four other defendants have challenged the law on similar grounds. Judges in those cases may find Leibowitz’s reasoning persuasive, but they are not bound by his decision.
Trump has portrayed noncitizen voting as part of a broad Democratic Party conspiracy to dilute Republican power. But Cox was one of just 129 people charged with violating the law known as “voting by an alien,” according to a Reuters investigation published in July.
The investigation, published on July 19, found no defendant accused of conspiring to sway an election, backing a candidate or taking payment for a vote.
The Reuters investigation also showed that most of the people accused of noncitizen voting were lawful permanent residents who either registered by mistake or were encouraged to sign up to vote based on the misguided advice of an election worker or government clerk.
Illegal voting is grounds for deportation, and as Reuters has reported, the Trump administration has been investigating noncitizen voting and deporting defendants, sometimes years after their criminal cases were closed. Cox’s attorney Udolf said he hoped the government would not move to deport her, citing her declining health.
On July 16, Trump said without evidence that 278,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Five days later, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, said about 400 noncitizens in her state voted after a software error mistakenly registered about 6,600 people in 2023-24. The Justice Department has demanded their names, nationalities and addresses.
(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; additional reporting and writing by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Franklin Paul and Edmund Klamann)
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