Telepeer

Riverside County sheriff’s investigation that seized 650,000-plus ballots is ‘on hold’

March 30, 2026

An investigation into more than 650,000 Riverside County ballots from November’s special election is on hold until legal issues are resolved, Sheriff Chad Bianco said Monday, March 30.

Bianco, who is running for governor, said in an emailed statement Monday that the investigation is “on hold because of the politically motivated lawsuits and court filings.”

Meanwhile, California Attorney General Rob Bonta on Friday, March 27, opened another legal front in his fight to halt the investigation.

He asked the California Supreme Court for an emergency order to prevent what he called an “unprecedented constitutional emergency” that threatens to undermine the public’s confidence in elections.

That request comes as Bonta’s lawyers pursue a similar halt to Bianco’s probe in Riverside Superior Court. A Monday hearing in that case was postponed until Thursday, April 2.

Bonta previously sought an appellate court’s help in stopping the investigation, only to be told he needed to start with the superior court.

Bianco, a Republican who is at or near the top of gubernatorial candidates in recent polls, also faces a legal challenge from the UCLA Voting Rights Project, which is asking the supreme court to force the sheriff to return ballots to the Riverside County Registrar of Voters that were seized through three search warrants issued in February and March.

The controversy, which is getting national attention, stems from California’s Proposition 50 special election in November. A majority of California voters, including 56% in Riverside County, approved a ballot measure that redrew the state’s congressional districts to help Democrats gain seats in the House of Representatives.

The Riverside Election Integrity Team, a citizen’s election watchdog group, said it conducted an election audit and found a roughly 45,000-vote gap between ballots cast and ballots counted in Riverside County.

On Feb. 10 — a day after Bianco’s office secured its first search warrant — Riverside County Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco gave a presentation to the county Board of Supervisors in which he rebuked the watchdog group’s audit.

According to Tinoco, the group “relied on raw, interim, and imprecise data to estimate the number of votes cast, instead of relying on the number of cast ballots actually logged into the tracking system after verification,” the attorney general’s office wrote in legal papers.

The actual gap between ballots counted and ballots cast, according to Tinoco, is just 103 votes — well within the acceptable margin of error set by California’s Secretary of State, which oversees elections.

Despite Tinoco’s assertions, the sheriff obtained three search warrants from Riverside Superior Court for the county’s Proposition 50 ballots and related election materials. The last warrant, executed Tuesday, March 24, allowed the department to seize 426 boxes of election materials. That was in addition to about 1,000 boxes seized from earlier warrants.

In a Friday, March 20, news conference, Bianco said his office, under the watch of a court-appointed special master, would count all the ballots to see if any gap like the one described by the election integrity team exists.

If it doesn’t, the case is closed, Bianco said. If a gap is found, the sheriff, who is elected to his post, said his department would try to find out why.

That reasoning doesn’t fly with Bonta, an elected Democrat whose office is already investigating the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department for alleged civil rights violations, a probe Bianco called politically motivated.

Affidavits in support of the sheriff’s search warrants “did not identify any specific felony offense the Sheriff had probable cause to believe had been committed or that a particular person had committed a felony” as required by law, Bonta’s office argued in court filings.

The attorney general also accuses the sheriff of defying his directives to stand down and coordinate with his office on the investigation. Bonta argued that the state constitution gives him authority over sheriffs.

Bianco, who has called Bonta “an embarrassment to law enforcement,” accused the attorney general of interfering in a lawful investigation.

Robert Tyler, of the Murrieta-based Advocates for Faith & Freedom, is representing Bianco in court.

In a court filing, Tyler wrote that the county counsel’s office, which normally represents the sheriff, told Bianco to find another lawyer because county counsel represents the registrar of voters.

In a March 20 email to Bonta’s office, Tyler wrote that the sheriff’s department believes “the totality of the circumstances” and evidence presented to get the search warrants “shows that there is a fair probability that evidence of a crime is located in the total ballot count” and related documents.

Bonta, Tyler wrote in a legal filing, was “asking for something extraordinary: Halt a lawfully initiated criminal investigation and cease performing core constitutional and statutory duties — based largely on the Attorney General’s disagreement with the investigation’s purpose, pace, and optics …”

Further, Superior Court Judge Jay Kiel, who signed the warrants, “retains continuing jurisdiction and control over the seized ballots and materials because the Sheriff’s possession is custodial and ‘subject to the order of the court,’” Tyler added.

In the third warrant issued Thursday, March 19, Kiel, who was aware of Bonta’s “conflicting demands,” ordered the appointment of a special master “an independent person to carry out the counting of ballots,” Tyler wrote.

The sheriff’s department “did not locate a special master willing to serve without compensation,” Tyler wrote, adding that Kiel “would not give further direction” to the sheriff until Bonta’s Superior Court case was addressed.

In arguing against Bonta’s superior court request for a sped-up hearing schedule, Tyler wrote: “The Sheriff’s Department is not counting ballots and has no intention of counting the ballots unless the courts otherwise permit.”

He added: “The Sheriff has ceased the investigation pending resolution of this case. Furthermore, the evidence seized is in the Sheriff’s Department’s protective custody.”

In its California Supreme Court filing, Bonta’s lawyers said Bianco sped up his investigation and seized about 1,000 boxes of ballot materials after the attorney general told him to stop.

“The importance of the dispute is only magnified in this case because the Sheriff rejects the Attorney General’s supervision to pursue an unprecedented investigation into purported election fraud,” the office wrote.

The integrity of the ballots seized by Bianco “is now at risk,” its brief added.

“And because the Sheriff ’s misguided investigation is predicated on baseless claims of election irregularities, the Sheriff ’s actions threaten to jeopardize public confidence in the upcoming primary and general elections, not just in Riverside County but around the State.”

Tyler, in his filing with the superior court, argued that it would be more damaging to public confidence in elections to halt the investigation now given the publicity it’s received.

With the November midterms on the horizon, Bianco’s investigation comes amid a continuing debate over the integrity of the nation’s elections. The sheriff is a proud supporter of President Donald Trump, who claims without evidence that voter fraud cost him the 2020 presidential election.

Orange County Register

News Details

Riverside County sheriff’s investigation that seized 650,000-plus ballots is ‘on hold’

News

CONTACT INFO

QUICK LINKS

SERVICES

CURRENT NEWS