U.S. District Judge Eleanor Ross recused herself Tuesday from a federal fight over Georgia election records after the Justice Department challenged whether she could remain impartial in the case. The dispute centers on a lawsuit the department filed against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger seeking an unredacted statewide voter list.
Ross said she was stepping aside out of an abundance of caution for the potential perception of bias. She wrote that she could not discount the possibility that an objective observer might read her attendance at an event sponsored by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s campaign as support for Willis’s position.
The Justice Department had moved to remove Ross from the case after reports of her attendance at the event for Willis raised questions about her ability to hear the dispute fairly. Ross said she had gone only to a private mixer on the sidelines of the event to see former colleagues from the district attorney’s office, where she once worked.
The recusal removes the judge from a live federal case that puts the Justice Department against Raffensperger over access to Georgia’s voter list, but it does not resolve the underlying fight over the records. What remains unanswered is who will take over the case next.
The dispute also lands against the backdrop of Ross’s prior discipline. A court investigation found that she had sex in her chambers with a police officer, attended a partisan event and initially lied when confronted with the allegations, later leading to a private reprimand. Her ties to Willis became part of the recusal fight because Ross had previously worked in the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, and Ross had said Willis had been a friend since 1999.
That history mattered because Willis, in August 2023, obtained an indictment against Donald Trump and 18 others in a separate criminal case that was later dismissed in November. In the records case, though, the immediate issue is narrower: Ross is off the bench, and the court now has to decide which judge will inherit a politically charged dispute over who gets to see Georgia’s voter data.
