Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a leading Republican candidate for governor, has seized more than 650,000 ballots from last November’s election to determine, he says, whether they were fraudulently counted.
“This investigation is simple: Physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes recorded,” Bianco said at a news conference Friday.
The unusual probe drew a sharp rebuke from California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, who said in a statement that it is “unprecedented in both scope and scale” and appears “not to be based on facts or evidence.”
Critics, meanwhile, said Bianco’s ballot seizure is a threat to democracy and another attempt by Republican election deniers to disenfranchise voters.
“There is no indication, anywhere in the United States, of widespread voter fraud,” Bonta said. “Counts, recounts, hand counts, audits, and court cases all support this.”
According to Bonta’s office, Bianco’s department on Feb. 26 seized about 1,000 boxes of ballot materials in Riverside County related to the November election for Proposition 50, which temporarily redrew the state’s congressional districts to favor Democrats in response to partisan redistricting in Republican states, including Texas.
In a March 4 letter to Bianco, Bonta said the seizure of the ballots “sets a dangerous precedent and will only sow distrust in our elections.” He threatened to seek legal recourse if Bianco does not halt his investigation.
Bonta also said he has “serious concerns” about whether Bianco had probable cause to obtain two warrants for the election materials and questioned whether Bianco had concealed important information from the magistrate judge who approved the warrants.
Bianco said his investigators are looking into allegations by a local citizens group that “did their own audit” and found that the county’s tally was falsely inflated by more than 45,000 votes — a claim that local election officials have rejected. He said that it’s his constitutional duty to investigate a potential crime and that he is not trying to change the election results.
Proposition 50 passed in Riverside County with 56% of the vote — a margin of more than 82,000 ballots. Statewide, it passed with about 64% of the vote and a margin of more than 3.3 million ballots.
Bianco’s investigation comes as President Trump, who remains fixated on his 2020 election loss, continues to amplify election conspiracy theories and has repeatedly called for the federal government to “nationalize” state-run elections to counter what he says is widespread fraud.
Bonta and California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, both Democrats, have vowed to fight federal interference that could affect voting in California, including efforts to seize election records, as the FBI recently did in Georgia.
Bianco is an outspoken Trump supporter who said in an endorsement video in 2024 that, after 30 years of putting criminals in jail, he figured it was “time to put a felon in the White House — Trump 2024, baby” — referencing Trump’s conviction by a New York jury for falsifying business records while paying hush money to a porn actor.
His investigation, which includes all the ballots cast in Riverside County in November, raises questions about how he would handle the election denialism movement if elected governor.
A poll released last week by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times showed Bianco and conservative commentator Steve Hilton leading the crowded field of gubernatorial candidates by slim margins, with the Democratic vote split among multiple candidates in a left-leaning state.
Kim Nalder, a political science professor and director of the Project for an Informed Electorate at Sacramento State, said that Bianco’s ballot seizure is “the sort of thing that should not happen in a healthy democracy.”
The system has plenty of safeguards, she noted, including county registrars and the California Fair Political Practices Commission.
“It’s terrifying, honestly, that the jurisdiction over ballots and election processes and recounts should even be in question and that a sheriff should feel himself entitled to seize ballots,” she said.
On Saturday, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democratic candidate for governor, said that Bianco appeared to be chasing “MAGA stardom” and called his investigation “a dangerous abuse of power and no different from what we’re seeing from Donald Trump and the extreme Republican efforts to disenfranchise voters nationally.”
A citizens group called the Riverside Election Integrity Team has said it performed an audit finding that 45,896 more ballots were counted than were cast.
In a lengthy February presentation to the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco disputed that figure, saying it was based on a misunderstanding of raw data that had not been fully processed.
The actual discrepancy, Tinoco said, was 103 votes, a variance of 0.016%.
Bianco on Friday said that there “is no acceptable error, small or large, in our elections.”
The sheriff did not name the Riverside Election Integrity Team, but his description of the allegations brought to him by “a group of citizen volunteers” matched theirs.
Bianco said the investigation was “not a recount” for Proposition 50 and was “just as much to prove the election is accurate as it is to show otherwise — we will not know until the count is complete.”
Bonta said his office has “attempted to work cooperatively” with the Sheriff’s Department to understand the basis for the probe. The sheriff, Bonta said, “has delayed, stonewalled, and otherwise refused to work with us in good faith” and failed to provide most of the requested documents.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former senior trial attorney overseeing voting enforcement for the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, said Bianco is spreading “false claims” about a fair election that was decided by a huge margin.
Becker questioned how warrants could have been issued for the ballots, “given that this likely implicates California laws requiring election officials to maintain chain of custody of all election materials for many months after an election.”
“For transparency, the Sheriff should share all affidavits and evidence offered in support of the warrant, as well as details about how/where the ballots are being stored,” he said in an email.
Bianco has said the warrants are now sealed.
In his March 4 letter, the attorney general criticized Bianco’s plan to use Sheriff’s Department staffers, “who are not trained and have no experience,” to count the ballots.
At his news conference Friday, Bianco fired back by calling Bonta “an embarrassment to law enforcement.”
Nalder, the Sacramento State professor, said vote counting is a more sophisticated, rigorous and regulated process than most people realize.
“That’s why any rando off the street can’t be asked to do something as delicate as counting ballots,” she said. “And law enforcement officers are trained in a very different way. It’s not their area of expertise.”
A Riverside County Superior Court judge, Bianco said, has ordered the appointment of a special master to oversee the ballot count.
In a statement Friday, Secretary of State Weber said “the Sheriff’s assertion that his deputies know how to count is admirable. The fact remains that he and his deputies are not elections officials and they do not have expertise in election administration.”