Sheriff Seizes 650,000 Ballots — California Election Takes Huge Turn
California’s highest court is weighing a dispute that could define how far local law enforcement may go when it suspects election irregularities, after Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco seized more than 650,000 ballots from the state’s November 2025 special election and refused to return them while legal challenges moved through the courts.
The California Supreme Court heard arguments Aug. 24 in two related cases challenging Bianco’s actions.
The dispute is real, the ballots remain in the sheriff’s custody, and Bianco continues to defend his decision.
But the evidence surrounding the underlying fraud allegation is far less settled than some political accounts suggest.
No completed independent recount has publicly established that Riverside County’s voting system produced a fraudulent result or that voting machines counted tens of thousands of ballots that did not exist.
Instead, the legal fight now centers on two narrower questions: whether California law allowed a sheriff to remove voted ballots from the custody of election officials under search warrants, and whether Attorney General Rob Bonta had authority to direct Bianco to halt the investigation.
Those questions have consequences well beyond one county because they involve the chain of custody for election materials and the relationship between elected sheriffs and California’s chief law-enforcement officer.
Bianco seized the ballots while investigating a complaint from the Riverside Election Integrity Team, a local citizens group that said records obtained from the county showed a large discrepancy between the number of ballots reflected in ballot statements and the county’s certified totals.
According to court filings, the group calculated that 627,802 ballots had been received and that 16,376 were rejected, leaving 611,426 valid ballots.
The county’s public tally showed 657,322 votes counted.
From those figures, the group alleged that 45,896 more ballots had been counted than were reflected in the records it reviewed.
That allegation became the basis for Bianco’s investigation.
But Riverside County Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco has repeatedly disputed the group’s interpretation.
Election officials said the activists were comparing preliminary or administrative ballot records with final certified figures in a way that did not account for how the records are generated and reconciled.
Officials said the actual final discrepancy was 103 votes, not tens of thousands.
That distinction is central to understanding the case.
Bianco has publicly suggested that investigators now possess evidence showing a difference between physical ballots and machine-generated totals.
“How strange, that now we have evidence that the machines counted something different than the ballots that we have, and an Attorney General runs in to stop that investigation so that we’ll never know,” Bianco told reporters after the Supreme Court hearing.
That statement reflects Bianco’s allegation.
It is not the same as a final forensic finding.
The sheriff’s attempted recount was stopped before it was completed, and no publicly released independent audit has established that voting machines added tens of thousands of nonexistent votes.
The certified election result also makes clear that the alleged discrepancy, even if it had been substantiated at the level claimed by the citizens group, would not have changed the outcome of Proposition 50 in Riverside County.
Official results show Proposition 50 received 369,565 votes in Riverside County and 286,995 votes against it.
That is a margin of 82,570 votes.
Statewide, the measure passed 7,453,339 to 4,116,998.
The statewide margin was 3,336,341 votes.
That corrects another number that has circulated in some accounts describing the statewide margin as more than 3.4 million votes.
Proposition 50 temporarily replaced California’s congressional map with districts drawn by the Legislature for elections through 2030, making the November 2025 vote one of the most politically consequential special elections in the state in years.
The controversy began after the Riverside Election Integrity Team presented its concerns to county officials and law enforcement.
Bianco’s department then sought search warrants for election materials.
Riverside County Superior Court authorized warrants, and sheriff’s deputies ultimately took custody of more than 650,000 ballots and other election materials.
Bianco has argued that once his department received a complaint suggesting possible criminal conduct, he had a duty to investigate and could use ordinary criminal search-warrant procedures to obtain potential evidence.
“I did this, and this was legal,” Bianco told reporters after Monday’s hearing.
“I went a different route. They are legal. Both routes are legal. It’s just their side doesn’t like the route I chose,” he added.
His attorney, Bradley Hertz, made the same basic argument before the justices.
Hertz said the sheriff was not conducting an ordinary election recount under the Elections Code but a criminal investigation under the Penal Code.
Because a judge had approved the warrants, the defense argues, Bianco was entitled to seize materials relevant to that investigation.
That theory ran directly into language in California’s Elections Code that became the focus of the Supreme Court hearing.
Section 15551 addresses custody of voted ballots when an election contest or criminal prosecution is pending.
The law says that the ballots may be subject to a court’s order and preserved until the proceeding is complete.
But it then states that the ballot package and its contents may not be taken from the custody of the elections official.
Attorneys challenging Bianco argue that the final command is categorical.
The sheriff’s lawyers argue the provision does not prevent law enforcement from executing a valid search warrant during the investigative stage before a prosecution has begun.
The justices appeared skeptical of that distinction.
Justice Kelli Evans pressed Hertz on how a statute saying ballots may not be removed “in no event” could permit the sheriff’s interpretation.
Justice Goodwin Liu questioned the logic of a rule that would allow law enforcement to seize ballots during an investigation but require their return once a prosecution formally began.
The questioning did not constitute a ruling.
Judges often test arguments aggressively at oral argument, and the court has not yet announced its decision.
But the tenor of the hearing suggested that Bianco faces a significant challenge in persuading the court that the ordinary search-warrant process overrides the election code’s special custody rules.
The second case raises a different question.
Bonta argues that California’s Constitution and Government Code give the attorney general direct supervisory authority over county sheriffs in matters involving their official law-enforcement duties.
Article V, Section 13 of the California Constitution identifies the attorney general as the state’s chief law officer and provides for direct supervision of sheriffs and district attorneys.
Government Code Section 12560 further says the attorney general may direct the activities of a sheriff when the attorney general considers it necessary in the public interest for the investigation or detection of crime.
Bonta relied on that authority when his office told Bianco to preserve the seized materials and pause investigative activity while the state reviewed what had happened.
The attorney general later sought court intervention requiring the return of the election materials.
Bianco disputes Bonta’s reading.
“If you take it word for word, in that context, it means that he has direct authority that if I’m not doing my job he can order me to do it and if I don’t do it he can do it for me. But he cannot stop an investigation,” Bianco said outside the courthouse.
Bonta takes the opposite position.
“This is a sheriff that – despite the clear language in the California constitution, and in California government code, providing me direct supervision, authority over him – failed to comply with it,” Bonta said.
He added that Bianco’s refusal made the alleged violations more serious.
During oral argument, the justices also appeared doubtful of the sheriff’s narrower interpretation of the attorney general’s supervisory power.
Hertz likened the attorney general’s role in some circumstances to that of an elder statesman who could advise or step in when local officials failed to act.
Justice Joshua Groban questioned how that could be reconciled with the ordinary meaning of direct supervision.
Again, the court has not ruled.
But the two cases place Bianco’s legal theory under pressure from both directions: the election code’s ballot-custody provisions and the attorney general’s asserted supervisory power.
The Supreme Court had already intervened before this week’s hearing.
On April 8, the court ordered Bianco, his department and anyone acting on their behalf to pause the investigation into the November 2025 election and preserve all seized items while the litigation proceeded.
That order stopped the sheriff’s ballot-counting operation but did not transfer physical custody back to the registrar.
As a result, the ballots remain with Bianco’s office.
Hertz told reporters that the sheriff is holding them as evidence and safeguarding them as a custodian for the court.
Bianco said he would comply if the Supreme Court ultimately orders him to return the materials.
The fact that the ballots remain in his custody does not mean the court has endorsed the seizure.
The April order was designed to freeze the situation while the justices considered the competing legal claims.
The court’s eventual ruling could determine whether those ballots must immediately return to the Riverside County Registrar of Voters and could establish a statewide rule for future attempts by local law enforcement to seize election materials.
The political context has made the case even more contentious.
Bianco was running for governor as a Republican when the investigation became public.
He did not advance to the general election in the June primary and has since said he plans to seek reelection as Riverside County sheriff in 2028.
Bonta is a Democrat, and the litigation has therefore been framed by some supporters of Bianco as a partisan attempt to shut down an election-integrity investigation.
Bonta and voting-rights advocates reject that characterization, saying the issue is not whether law enforcement can investigate election crimes but whether a sheriff can disregard the procedures California law establishes for handling voted ballots.
The UCLA Voting Rights Project filed a separate challenge on behalf of Riverside County voters.
Its lawyers argue that California already provides mechanisms for recounts, election contests and criminal investigations while keeping ballots within a controlled election-administration chain of custody.
They say allowing a sheriff to bypass those procedures with an ordinary warrant could create a precedent under which local law-enforcement officials remove ballots during politically sensitive disputes.
That concern appeared to interest the justices.
Several questions explored how far Bianco’s theory would extend and whether it could permit a sheriff to seize ballots while an election was still being administered.
Bianco’s attorney said other legal protections would apply close to Election Day but did not identify a clear limiting rule during the exchange.
For election-law advocates, that is why the dispute matters more than Proposition 50.
If the court accepts the sheriff’s approach, a local law-enforcement agency armed with a warrant could have a stronger claim to take physical control of ballots despite election statutes assigning custody to election officials.
If the court rejects it, the ruling could reinforce that election materials remain under specialized statutory safeguards even when a criminal investigation is contemplated.
The dispute is unfolding during a broader national struggle over election administration ahead of the November 2026 midterms.
The Trump administration has expanded federal scrutiny of voting procedures and election records in several states.
In April, the Justice Department demanded all ballots, ballot receipts and ballot envelopes from the 2024 federal election in Wayne County, Michigan, home to Detroit.
Michigan officials said nearly 865,000 votes were cast there and challenged the demand, arguing that the records were held by local municipal clerks and that federal officials were overreaching.
That federal request is legally distinct from the Riverside seizure.
Still, both controversies reflect the growing tension over who may obtain physical election materials and under what authority.
A separate fight over mail voting reached the U.S. Supreme Court this week.
On Aug. 24, the justices lifted one injunction that had blocked part of a Trump executive order seeking major changes to mail-ballot administration.
The decision gave the administration a procedural victory, but it did not finally resolve the order’s legality.
Another injunction still blocks part of the policy, and further litigation is expected.
That distinction is important because the federal ruling does not establish that every restriction in the executive order is lawful, nor does it decide the California ballot-custody dispute.
The Riverside case remains a state-law controversy governed principally by California’s Constitution, Elections Code and Government Code.
At the center of it is a question that sounds simple but has proven difficult in practice: when law enforcement believes ballots may contain evidence, does ordinary criminal investigative authority control, or do election-specific custody laws set a boundary that even a sheriff with a warrant cannot cross?
Bianco says he followed a lawful path and would do it again.
Bonta says the sheriff exceeded his authority and ignored the state’s chief law-enforcement officer.
Riverside election officials say the underlying discrepancy allegation was built on a misunderstanding of records and that the certified count was sound.
The citizens group that triggered the investigation says the differences it identified justified further scrutiny.
What cannot yet be said is that the sheriff has proved that voting machines produced a fraudulent count.
The public record shows an allegation, a disputed set of reconciliation figures and an interrupted investigation.
It does not show a completed recount establishing that the certified result was false.
That distinction is especially important because Bianco’s post-hearing comments can easily be read as announcing a factual conclusion that the litigation has not established.
The California Supreme Court is not being asked to certify the citizens group’s fraud theory.
It is being asked to decide who had legal custody of the ballots and what powers a sheriff and attorney general possess when election materials become the subject of a criminal inquiry.
The answer could come after weeks or months of deliberation.
Until then, the status quo remains unusual: more than 650,000 voted ballots from a completed statewide election are still being held by a county sheriff under a preservation order while the state’s highest court decides whether they were lawfully taken in the first place.
For Bianco, the case is about his duty to investigate a complaint and protect evidence.
For Bonta and the voters challenging the seizure, it is about preventing any individual law-enforcement officer from bypassing the election system’s chain-of-custody rules.
And for Californians heading toward another major election in November, the most consequential issue may not be whether Proposition 50 was ever in doubt.
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It is whether the court draws a clear line governing who can touch, seize and retain the physical ballots on which election results ultimately depend.
