CBS (“Judge says federal law banning noncitizen voting is unconstitutional“):

In a possible blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to charge noncitizens with voting in U.S. elections, a judge has dismissed a federal case against a Jamaican national accused of illegally voting, finding the law she was charged under is unconstitutional.

Miami-based U.S. District Judge David S. Leibowitz ruled Thursday in a 31-page order that the criminal case against Chelsea Cox, who was charged in October 2025 with a misdemeanor for illegally voting in 2020, must be dismissed. He said a decades-old federal law that prohibits a non-U.S. citizen from voting in a federal election, 18 U.S.C. § 611, is unconstitutional. 

Under the U.S. Constitution, Leibowitz wrote, only states can set voter qualifications, not Congress. The judge said state prosecutors in Florida could prosecute Cox under state law for unlawfully voting, not the federal government.

The decision applies only to Cox and appears to be the first time a court has deemed the statute unconstitutional. But it could dent the Justice Department’s push to pursue noncitizen voting, a practice that most elections experts say is rare but that President Trump has long alleged — without evidence — is common.

Shortly after Leibowitz’s decision, the Justice Department moved to appeal the ruling. A spokesperson for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The decision involved a federal law that makes it a misdemeanor for noncitizens to vote. It does not cover a separate law barring people from making false claims of citizenship in order to vote, another tool used by the Justice Department in recent months.

“This is an unusual criminal case. It rests upon a forty-year-old federal statute, 18 U.S.C. § 611, that prohibits the act of voting in a federal election by a non-U.S. citizen. Until very recently, no federal court has been presented with the following question about that statute: Did Congress have Constitutional authority to enact it? That’s unusual, all by itself,” Leibowitz wrote. 

The Biden-appointed judge went on to say the Justice Department’s “principal defense of the statute’s constitutionality invokes a single Supreme Court case that is very, very weak.”

“So why does the Government lead with such a weak hand? Because it’s the best hand it can play,” he said. “And why is that? Because the text, structure, and original public meaning of the Constitution show that Congress does not have the constitutional power to enact this statute.”

My first instinct was that the ruling was bonkers.

The Elections Clause (Article I, Section 4) is incredibly short and plain:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

The final subclause, “except as to the Places of chusing Senators,” was rendered null by the 12th Amendment. What’s left couldn’t be more simple: the legislatures of the several states have the authority to set the times, places, and manner of elections for Congress. And Congress has the authority to override them.

As the historical background section of the Annotated Constitution on Congress’ website notes,

Alexander Hamilton, in the Federalist No. 59, reasoned that unless Congress had authority to regulate Senate and House elections, state legislatures might at any moment annihilate [the U.S. Government], by neglecting to provide for the choice of persons to administer its affairs. Noting that the Elections Clause gave state legislatures primary power over Senate and House elections, Hamilton took the position that Congress would likely involve itself in congressional elections only if extraordinary circumstances might render that interposition necessary to [the U.S. Government’s] safety. Echoing Hamilton’s expectation that only extraordinary circumstances would involve Congress in regulating House and Senate elections, Justice Story reasoned that, as representatives of states and their people, Members of Congress would be reluctant to impose election laws on objecting states.

The footnotes further inform us that

In 1842, Congress passed its first legislation to regulate House and Senate elections by establishing the district system for House elections. Act of June 25, 1842, ch. 47, § 2, 5 Stat. 491. Later legislation provided that Representatives be elected by districts composed of a compact and contiguous territory and containing as nearly as practicable an equal number of inhabitants.

So the district system—much declaimed here at OTB—is a result of longstanding federal law. As is our longstanding practice of holding elections for federal office on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

But it turns out that there’s actually a longstanding understanding that, while Congress has override authority on the time, place, and manner of federal elections, it has no authority to set the qualifications for voting in them!

Going back to the Annotated Constitution, we see that:

The Elections Clause’s Times, Places and Manner encompasses a complete code for congressional elections, not only as to times and places, but in relation to notices, registration, supervision of voting, protection of voters, prevention of fraud and corrupt practices, counting of votes, duties of inspectors and canvassers, and making and publication of election returns. States and Congress may also establish sanctions for violating election laws and procedures for recounts and primaries. The Elections Clause however, does not permit states or Congress to set voter qualifications for congressional elections, which, under the Constitution, must be the same qualifications necessary to vote for the most numerous branch of the state legislature. [emphasis added]

They cite a 2013 case called Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, the details of which are unimportant here.

Arizona is correct that the Elections Clause empowers Congress to regulate how federal elections are held, but not who may vote in them. The Constitution prescribes a straightforward rule for the composition of the federal electorate. Article I, §2, cl. 1, provides that electors in each State for the House of Representatives “shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature,” and the Seventeenth Amendment adopts the same criterion for senatorial elections. Cf. also Art. II, §1, cl. 2 (“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,” presidential electors). One cannot read the Elections Clause as treating implicitly what these other constitutional provisions regulate explicitly. “It is difficult to see how words could be clearer in stating what Congress can control and what it cannot control. Surely nothing in these provisions lends itself to the view that voting qualifications in federal elections are to be set by Congress.”

[…]

Prescribing voting qualifications, therefore, “forms no part of the power to be conferred upon the national government” by the Elections Clause, which is “expressly restricted to the regulation of the times, the places, and the manner of elections.” The Federalist No. 60, at 371 (A. Hamilton); see also id., No. 52, at 326 (J. Madison). This allocation of authority sprang from the Framers’ aversion to concentrated power. A Congress empowered to regulate the qualifications of its own electorate, Madison warned, could “by degrees subvert the Constitution.”

One of the footnotes in the ruling points to the inability of Congress to unilaterally lower the voting age to 18. Which, of course, is why we had to amend the Constitution (26th) to do so. Ditto women (19th) and racial minorities (15th). Or ban poll taxes (24th).

So, while it may seem obvious that Congress can—and should!—limit voting in federal elections to U.S. citizens, it actually can’t. I fully expect this ruling to survive appeal.