‘A blatant political ploy’: California sheriff’s seizure of referendum ballots sets off alarm bells

A California sheriff’s decision to seize about 650,000 ballots based on specious allegations of fraud has raised considerable alarm bells that similar efforts to undermine confidence in the electoral system could materialize this fall.

The episode underscores how sheriffs and other officials can transform shoddy claims about voter fraud into law enforcement actions. Executing a warrant to seize ballots disrupts the chain of custody that is critical to maintaining ballot integrity, and also plants the idea in the public’s mind that a crime has occurred.

Chad Bianco, the sheriff in Riverside county, California, obtained warrants in February and March to seize the ballots related to a special election last year in which voters overwhelmingly approved a referendum to redraw California’s congressional districts. The warrants remain sealed, but Bianco had said he was investigating claims by a citizen activist group that there was difference of 45,896 in the number of ballots cast and counted. The referendum, Proposition 50, passed by nearly 30 points statewide. In Riverside county, which stretches from just east of Los Angeles to the Arizona border, it passed by more than 82,000 votes, a nearly 13-point difference.

There have been no accusations of fraud or wrongdoing and there was no recount requested.

Bianco, a Republican, is also running for governor of California and is closely vying to be one of the top two finishers in the 2 June primary that will advance to the general. Donald Trump endorsed a Republican rival, Steve Hilton, this week.

Art Tinoco, the registrar of voters in Riverside county, has said the county investigated those allegations and determined they were untrue, telling the county’s board of supervisors in February that the analysis underlying those claims was misleading. Activists used a raw tally of the number of ballots submitted to make their claim. The activists also failed to consider that the county first verifies the signature and other information on a ballot before it is cast to make sure it can be counted before submitting them for counting. When the data is compared correctly, there are 103 more ballots counted than voters recorded, a minimal discrepancy that is in line with what other counties saw, and within what is allowed in California, Tinoco told the officials.

Bianco had told the San Francisco Chronicle his office planned to do a hand recount of the ballots – a method prone to error – and that he expected the totals to match exactly. He told the Washington Post he would consider seizing ballots in the 2 June primary if there were questions about the results.

California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, a Democrat, sued to stop Bianco’s investigation last month, calling it an “amateur and dubious ‘recount’”. “The sheriff’s misguided investigation threatens to sow distrust and jeopardize public confidence in the upcoming primary and general elections, not just in Riverside county but around the state.” Bianco announced days later he was halting the investigation “because of the politically motivated lawsuits and court filings”. However, the attorney general’s litigation seeking a court order to stop the investigation is still ongoing.

“Your decision to seize ballots and begin counting them based on vague, unsubstantiated allegations about irregularities in the November special election results sets a dangerous precedent and will only sow distrust in our elections,” Bonta wrote in a 4 March letter to Bianco.

In a statement, Bianco denied politics played a role in his investigation.

“I appreciate everyone’s opinion when they obtained their expertise from television. Any investigation is a fact-finding mission to determine if allegations are true or not, and who, if anyone, is responsible. Disingenuous politicians and clickbait media have spun this into something political. Investigations do not stop because someone might get their feelings hurt,” he said.

“This investigation was kept very quiet by me; it was twisted into a political event and brought to the public by an absolute embarrassment to law enforcement, Rob Bonta. The only undermining of confidence in our elections is the abuse of the legal system to stop a lawful investigation to cover up the results,” he added.

Bianco’s efforts closely mirror actions the justice department has taken in conducting an investigation into the 2020 election in Fulton county, Georgia, where the FBI has relied on disproven claims touted by citizen activists to convince a magistrate judge to sign off on a search warrant to seize ballots from the 2020 election.

To obtain a search warrant, prosecutors must first convince a judge there is probable cause that a crime has occurred. In Fulton county, experts have said the underlying search warrant affidavit does not show probable cause of a crime. In Riverside county, the warrants remain sealed, so there is no way to evaluate the basis of Bianco’s claims.

“Until evidence is actually provided, it seems like the Riverside sheriff is out there chasing ghosts,” said Darius Kemp, the executive director of the California chapter of Common Cause, a non-partisan watchdog group. “I think Californians are some of the smartest people in the country, and I think they see what the actions by the Riverside sheriff are, which is a blatant political ploy to try to undermine our voting systems in the state.”

Bianco, who was first elected in 2018, was briefly a member of the Oath Keepers, the far-right extremist group, and appears to have had a years-long relationship with the citizen group pushing the allegations, which calls itself the Riverside Election Integrity Team. “Everything I found went straight to the sheriff, because I knew [him] to be mindful. And so, that’s what helped us get him to open the investigation,” Shelby Bunch, a member of the group, said in a 2024 podcast obtained by the Campaign Legal Center, a non-partisan legal organization.

Bunch also suggested Bianco had unsuccessfully tried to obtain warrants before. “Sheriff Bianco is frustrated because when he does reach out in the judicial system, he’s shot down. There are really obvious things that any judge in a normal situation, I think, would step up and look into it,” she said in the podcast.

The judge who signed off on the warrant to seize the ballots, Jay Kiel, said when he was running for the bench in 2022 that “we’re so fortunate to have Chad Bianco”, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. A political action committee linked to Bianco also gave $10,000 in support of Kiel, the Chronicle reported.

Bianco has denied any wrongdoing. “It’s impossible to know who the duty judge is on that day,” he told CalMatters. “It happened to be a particular judge.”

Bianco has also been aligned with the so-called constitutional sheriff’s movement, which is based on the idea that sheriffs hold power that exceeds that of any other officer of the federal government. A Michigan sheriff associated with the movement, Dar Leaf, attempted to seize voting machines in 2020. Other sheriffs associated with the movement have embraced false claims about the 2020 election and called for increased election monitoring.

“What we see with the constitutional sheriff’s movement is some isolated, infrequent, rare cases where a sheriff has pursued an investigation where there isn’t really sufficient predicate evidence to go and pursue it,” said Katherine Reisner, the director of public safety and elections at the States United Democracy Center. “When all is said and done, they turn over their findings to a prosecutor, and we see that prosecutors decline to prosecute any crimes because they haven’t been shown sufficient evidence of any crimes.”