Who is Sheriff Chad Bianco and why did he seize 650,000 California ballots?
How a Riverside County lawman running for governor launched an unprecedented election fraud probe, defied the state's attorney general and ignited a legal battle that now sits before California's highest court.
Riverside County, California Sheriff Chad Bianco
By Shawn Geddes
Summary
Unprecedented Ballot Seizure: Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco seized over 650,000 ballots from a November 2025 special election after a local activist group alleged a discrepancy of "phantom votes”. This action was taken despite the county's Registrar of Voters explaining that the group had misread the data, and previous internal sheriff investigations finding no evidence of widespread fraud.
Defiance of the Attorney General: The seizure ignited a constitutional clash when California Attorney General Rob Bonta ordered Bianco to halt the investigation, citing his constitutional "direct supervision" over sheriffs. Bianco ignored the order and continued seizing ballots, arguing that as an elected county official, he holds independent authority to investigate suspected crimes.
Supreme Court Intervention: The California Supreme Court unanimously intervened to halt the investigation and placed the seized ballots under the supervision of a special master. The court is now reviewing the underlying, historically unresolved constitutional question of whether the state's attorney general has the legal authority to force a county sheriff to stop an investigation.
In three years of investigating elections in Riverside County, California, the sheriff’s detectives had found no evidence of widespread fraud. Their own internal reports said so. Cases were opened and quietly closed.
But Riverside County Sheriff Chad Biancokept looking.
This past February, he found what he needed . . . or at least what he needed to act. Armed with sealed search warrants signed by a judge, Bianco sent his deputies to the county’s Registrar of Voters office and walked out with around 1,000 boxes containing more than 650,000 ballots from a November 2025 special election.
It was, legal scholars say, the first time in American history a county sheriff had taken custody of previously cast ballots.
What followed was a constitutional clash unlike anything California had seen: a governor’s race candidate defying the state attorney general, activists driving law enforcement decisions, and ultimately the California Supreme Court stepping in to call a halt.
“Phantom votes” and a disputed tally
The ballot seizure stemmed from Proposition 50, a November 2025 statewide special election measure that temporarily redrew California’s congressional district boundaries to benefit Democrats. The proposition passed statewide with about 56% of the vote and won Riverside County by more than 82,000 votes.
Shortly after the election, a local group called the Riverside Election Integrity Team, led by a man named Greg Langworthy, began combing through the county’s ballot intake records. The group announced that it discovered a discrepancy of nearly 46,000 votes between the official tally and handwritten logs from polling workers.
Some in the group called these “phantom votes.”
On Feb. 10, county supervisors held a hearing to address the allegations. (Watch the hearing in the YouTube video below).
Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco spent more than an hour explaining that the group had misread the data.
The handwritten logs, he said, were rough estimates written by polling workers as ballots arrived — not final counts.
The actual discrepancy, Tinoco told the board, was just 103 votes, a variance of less thantwo-hundredths of one percent.
The supervisors were not convinced there was a problem. But the sheriff’s office had already been moving.
One day before that hearing, a Riverside County Sheriff’s Office investigator appeared before a judge to request a search warrant for the ballots.
The warrant was granted and sealed.
A years-long crusade
The ballot seizure did not emerge from a single complaint.
Internal emails obtained by CalMatters and LAisttrace its origins to at least 2022, when a woman named Shelby Bunch began appearing at Riverside County government hearings claiming voting machines had been remotely manipulated.
Bianco opened a probe. His own senior investigator concluded there was no evidence of a crime and closed the case in July 2022.
Bianco did not let it rest.
In September 2022, Richard Mack’s Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association reached out to encourage Bianco to reopen and expand the investigation.
He did.
By late 2024, the Riverside Election Integrity Team had taken up the cause, and its audit claims became the basis for the warrant affidavit that authorized the seizure. The affidavit cited the activist group’s numbers. It did not include any independent investigative findings from the sheriff’s department itself.
The warrant was signed by Riverside County Superior Court Judge Jay Kiel, a jurist Bianco had endorsed in his 2022 campaign who had pledged, in a podcast appearance, to “bring balance back to the bench.”
It should be noted that law enforcement does not pick judges when applying for warrants. The judges are assigned, typically with a different judge dealing with warrants on different days.
Defying the Attorney General
News of the seizure became public on March 21, when Bianco held a press conference.
“This investigation is simple: Physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes reported,” he said. He described the effort as his “constitutional duty to pursue justice” and insisted that California Attorney General Rob Bonta had no authority to stop him.
His reasoning was sound. After all, he is in law enforcement. Law enforcement’s job is to investigate complaints of criminal activity.
To determine whether the complaints have merit.
However, Bonta disagreed. Aggressively.
The attorney general, himself a Democrat running for reelection, fired off a series of letters directing Bianco to pause and then halt the investigation, calling it “unprecedented in both scope and scale” and saying it appeared “not to be based on facts or evidence.”
Bonta also noted that the California Constitution grants the attorney general “direct supervision” over sheriffs “in all matters pertaining to the duties of their respective offices.”
Bianco ignored the letters.
Court documents later revealed that the sheriff’s office had begun counting ballots as early as March 5 while the attorney general was already ordering them to stop. By then, 22 boxes had been opened and 12,561 ballots counted.
Instead of standing down, Bianco kept marching forward.
In late March, after Bonta formally moved to halt the investigation in court, the sheriff directed his office to seize an additional 426 boxes of ballot materials.
“What the Sheriff says and what he does are often two different things,” Bonta’s office said in response to Bianco’s brief announcement that he was pausing the probe.
Courts get involved
Bonta’s first attempt to get a court order failed on procedural grounds. A three-judge appellate panel ruled he had filed in the wrong court.
He refiled in Riverside County Superior Court.
Meanwhile, the UCLA Voting Rights Project filed a separate petition directly with the California Supreme Court, representing four Riverside County voters. The petition argued that Bianco had violated California Elections Code, which requires ballots to remain in the custody of county elections officials even during criminal investigations.
The voters’ lawyers also raised the question of motivation.
Bianco was not only the county’s sheriff. He was one of the leading Republican candidates in the 2026 California governor’s race, running in part on an election integrity platform.
On April 7, the California Supreme Court intervened. In a unanimous order, the justices directed Bianco to immediately:
halt his investigation,
preserve all seized materials, and
agree to the appointment of a special master to take custody of the ballots.
The court also formally agreed to review the constitutional questions raised by the case on their merits.
On the same day, a Riverside County judge ordered the search warrants unsealed which revealed, for the first time, the full basis on which the ballot seizure had been authorized.
A constitutional question with no clear answer
At the heart of the legal dispute is a constitutional question that California courts have never definitively resolved:
Can the state’s attorney general order a county sheriff to stop an investigation?
The California Constitution says the attorney general has “direct supervision” over sheriffs.
But Bianco and his attorneys argue that as an elected county official, he holds independent authority not subject to the AG’s directives, particularly when he believes a crime has been committed.
Legal scholars say the case is genuinely unsettled.
No California court has ever squarely ruled on this question.
The California Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case suggests the justices view it as significant.
Adding to the legal complications, a data breach associated with the investigation exposed voter information (including names, party affiliations, home addresses, emails and phone numbers) for Riverside County residents.
The UCLA Voting Rights Project cited the breach as evidence of irreparable harm to voters.
The Riverside County Board of Supervisors announced it would not pay for Bianco’s legal defense in the case.
The bigger picture
The investigation sits at the intersection of several overlapping national trends: the rise of the constitutional sheriff movement, Republican-led challenges to Democratic-leaning election results, and the use of local law enforcement as a tool of election skepticism.
Around the same time Bianco was seizing ballots in Riverside, the FBI separately sought voter data from Maricopa County, Ariz., and seized paper ballots in Fulton County, Ga.
Both actions were similarly rooted in fraud claims from citizen election integrity groups, suggesting a broader coordinated effort.
Bianco has said he would not hesitate to seize ballots again, even in the June 2026 primary election for California governor, the very race in which his own name appears on the ballot.
Riverside County also plays a central role in counting votes for California’s 48th Congressional District, a competitive seat analysts consider pivotal to which party controls the House of Representatives after the November 2026 midterm elections.
Where things stand
As of May 2026, the California Supreme Court’s stay remains in effect. The ballots are held under special master supervision. On May 13, the court formally announced it would take up the UCLA Voting Rights Project lawsuit, Cervantes v. Bianco, signaling its intent to issue a ruling on the underlying constitutional dispute.
The ballots were originally scheduled to be destroyed this month under California’s six-month retention requirement for non-federal elections, but the ongoing litigation has prevented that from happening.
A ruling from the Supreme Court — one that could reshape the relationship between California’s county sheriffs and the state’s top law enforcement officer — is expected in the months ahead.
Resources
“Bill seeks to stop repeat of Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco's ballot seizure” (The Press-Enterprise)
California Redistricting Referendum Ballot Seizure Challenge (Democracy Docket)
“California sheriff says his seizure of more than 600,000 ballots is ‘normal law enforcement’” (CalMatters)
Chad Bianco (Wikipedia)
“Chad Bianco’s search warrants unsealed” (CalMatters)
“Court releases secret warrants that Riverside sheriff used to seize over 650,000 ballots” (Los Angeles Times)
Petition for Writ of Mandate and/or Other Extraordinary Relief and Request for Expedited Review (Cervantes v. Bianco)
Riverside County Board of Supervisors Meeting February 10, 2026 (YouTube video)
Riverside County Warrant Search public records database
“Sheriff Chad Bianco’s investigation” - Instagram video by the Los Angeles Times
“Tracking the Claims: How Election Fraud Allegations Sparked A Riverside County Investigation” (NBC Palm Springs)
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Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco suspends election ... https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-03-30/riverside-county-sheriff-chad-bianco-halts-his-election-fraud-probe
California sheriff seized 650,000 ballots. What we know about Chad ... https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-03-23/riverside-county-sheriff-has-seized-650-000-ballots-heres-what-we-know
Internal emails show how fringe groups fueled Sheriff Chad Bianco's ... https://laist.com/news/politics/internal-emails-show-how-fringe-groups-fueled-sheriff-chad-biancos-ballot-seizure
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Court unseals warrants tied to California sheriff's allegations of fraud ... https://www.ktvu.com/news/riverside-sheriffs-chad-bianco-election-investigation
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