Sheriff Chad Bianco told reporters he will not back down from his seizure of roughly 650,000 ballots from a November 2025 special election, even as California's attorney general calls his defiance a constitutional violation.
Bianco stood outside the California Supreme Court in San Francisco on Monday after his lawyers and the state's legal team squared off over whether the Riverside County sheriff had the authority to take the ballots in the first place. The court heard oral arguments but issued no immediate ruling, leaving the ballots, nearly 1,000 boxes of them, in Bianco's custody while justices deliberate.
The confrontation has been building since late 2025, when a local citizens group called the Riverside Election Integrity Team flagged what it described as a discrepancy of approximately 45,800 votes between handwritten ballot intake logs and the officially reported totals from a special election on Proposition 50, a legislative redistricting measure. Bianco obtained a warrant, seized the ballots, and launched an independent investigation. His stated goal was straightforward: physically count the ballots and compare the result with the total votes recorded.
Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta sent multiple letters ordering Bianco to stop the probe and return the ballots. Bianco refused. Bonta then filed a legal challenge in March, calling the situation a "constitutional emergency" and asking the state Supreme Court to intervene. The court temporarily halted Bianco's investigation, but the sheriff has continued to hold the ballots as what his lawyer calls evidence.
Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse Monday, Bianco was blunt:
"I did this, and this was legal. 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 went further, raising questions about the state's eagerness to shut down his probe before it could reach a conclusion. Bianco told reporters it was "strange" that evidence now suggests "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."
His lawyer, Bradley Hertz, framed the sheriff's position in custodial terms, telling reporters Monday that "the sheriff is holding that evidence, safeguarding it as a custodian for the court."
Bonta sees it differently. The attorney general argued that the California constitution and state government code give him direct supervisory authority over county sheriffs, and that Bianco knowingly defied that authority. Standing outside the same courthouse, Bonta told reporters:
"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."
He added: "He can read, he knows what it says, it makes his violations even more egregious."
The underlying dispute centers on the November 2025 special election for Proposition 50, a redistricting measure. Statewide, the proposition passed by more than 3.4 million votes, according to the California Secretary of State. But in Riverside County, the citizens group that filed the complaint claimed to have found roughly 45,000 excess votes, a gap between the physical ballot intake records and the officially reported totals.
Bianco has described the investigation as simple arithmetic. As he put it in March: "This investigation is simple: Physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes recorded." A judge appointed a special master to supervise the ballot count, lending judicial oversight to the process before the Supreme Court stepped in.
The UCLA Voting Rights Project filed a separate legal challenge to Bianco's actions. Chad Dunn, representing the project, argued at the hearing that no one in election law "gets to handle ballots on their own in the back room with their deputies." Bonta joined that challenge in his March filing.
Bianco, a Republican who was running for governor at the time of the seizure, has said the political backlash only deepened his suspicion that something was wrong. He characterized Bonta's response as "alarming interference" and described the attorney general's legal campaign as "lawfare orchestrated by political activists."
The broader fight over election integrity in California has intensified on multiple fronts. A sweeping FBI voter fraud investigation in Los Angeles has added to the pressure on state officials to account for irregularities.
The ballot seizure did not just provoke a court fight. It prompted the California legislature to act. Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 73 just six days before the state's June 2 primary, a law designed to block federal and local law enforcement from interfering with elections. Newsom cited widespread "anxiety" about election integrity as his reason for the rushed timeline.
State Senator Sabrina Cervantes, whose district includes Riverside County, framed the bill as a direct response to Bianco's actions: "We've seen an incident in my own home county of Riverside where ballots were seized and the chain of custody was broken. That is against the law."
Bianco and his supporters would argue the chain of custody was already in question, that the whole point of the investigation was to determine whether the reported vote totals matched the physical ballots. The new law, from their perspective, amounts to Sacramento slamming the door on scrutiny before anyone can finish counting.
The case also fits a wider national pattern. The Trump administration similarly seized ballots from a Georgia election office, and federal efforts to secure election integrity have expanded significantly. The Department of Homeland Security recently identified 278,000 noncitizens on voter rolls, and the DOJ has moved to deploy additional oversight ahead of future elections.
At the state level, the U.S. Supreme Court's recent ruling on mail-in voting enforcement has added another layer to the legal landscape surrounding ballot security nationwide.
Bianco told reporters Monday he would seize ballots again if faced with the same situation. He argued that the California government code Bonta relies on gives the attorney general authority to order a sheriff to do his job, not to order him to stop an investigation.
As Bianco put it: "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."
The Riverside County Sheriff's Office has maintained that the investigation is "lawful" and expressed confidence it will proceed once "this unprecedented attempt to cover it up by the attorney general has made its way through the courts."
Several key questions remain unanswered. The court has not revealed when it will rule. The specific evidence Bianco says shows the machines counted something different from the physical ballots has not been made public. And the exact nature of the original complaint, beyond the reported 45,800-vote discrepancy, remains unclear.
Meanwhile, election integrity legal efforts continue to expand at the federal level ahead of the 2026 midterms, with new organizations and DOJ alumni building infrastructure to challenge irregularities across the country.
The reported discrepancy in Riverside County may involve a fraction of the statewide vote on Proposition 50. But the state's frantic effort to stop anyone from physically counting the ballots tells its own story.
When officials fight harder to prevent a recount than to explain a discrepancy, voters are right to wonder what the counting would have found.