U.S. District Judge Eleanor Ross stepped aside Tuesday from a Georgia election records case after the Justice Department raised questions about whether she could be impartial. Ross, who was presiding over the lawsuit over an unredacted statewide voter list, said she was recusing herself out of an abundance of caution for the potential perception of bias.
The move matters because the case is active now, and it sits at the intersection of a federal demand and Georgia election records. The Justice Department is suing Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for access to the list, a dispute that has turned into another test of how far federal authority can reach into state election files.
Ross wrote that she could not discount the possibility that an objective observer might interpret her attendance at an event sponsored by Fani Willis's campaign as support for the district attorney's position. She said the Trump administration’s present and Willis’s past efforts had become heavily polarized, language that underscored how quickly the case had moved from a records fight to a question about the judge herself.
Her decision also brings back a past that was never far from the surface. Ross previously received a private reprimand after a court investigation found she had sex in the courthouse with a high-ranking uniformed police officer within earshot of staff, attended a partisan event and then initially lied when confronted with the allegations. In explaining the newer recusal, she acknowledged going to a private mixer held on the sidelines of the event to visit with former colleagues in the district attorney's office and said Fani Willis had been a friend since 1999.
The overlap between Ross and Willis reaches back to before Willis became district attorney, when the two worked in the Fulton County District Attorney's Office. That history has gained added weight because Willis later obtained an indictment against Donald Trump and 18 others in August 2023 over a scheme to overturn Georgia's 2020 election results, a case that was dismissed in November.
What happens next in the voter-list lawsuit is the key unanswered point. Ross’s recusal removes the judge who had been hearing the case, but the filings available Tuesday did not say who will take over or whether the schedule will change, leaving the Justice Department and Raffensperger to wait for the court to reset the fight.
