Chelsea Cox arrived in the United States as a tourist in 1999 and stayed after her visa lapsed the following year. She later obtained a Florida driver’s license with a fraudulent US Virgin Islands birth certificate and used those documents to join the voter rolls in 2012. Election records show that she cast ballots in federal elections between 2012 and 2020.
In October 2025, Cox, a Jamaican national and Florida resident, was charged with illegally voting in the 2020 election in a Miami-based federal case.
On Thursday, US District Judge David S. Leibowitz threw out the prosecution in a 31-page ruling. Leibowitz held that the 1996 law making noncitizen voting a federal crime conflicts with the US Constitution, which he said gives states, rather than Congress, the power to set voter qualifications.
The constitutional question concerns Congress’s authority over eligibility rules. Every state requires US citizenship for voting.
Leibowitz’s decision appears to be the first federal court ruling to find the 1996 law unconstitutional. It resolves Cox’s case alone and creates no binding rule for judges hearing other cases.
Leibowitz was nominated by Democratic President Joe Biden. Cox’s attorney is Bruce Udolf.
The ruling is described as a possible setback for the Trump administration’s efforts to prosecute noncitizens for voting. Since Trump returned to office in January 2025, the Justice Department has charged at least 60 people with noncitizen voting, and about 45 such cases remain pending around the country.
At least four other defendants have raised similar constitutional challenges to the law. A Reuters investigation published in July found that only 129 people had been charged under the statute, known as ‘voting by an alien’.
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