Chad Bianco is just asking questions.
Photo: Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
California’s ten-candidate gubernatorial primary is very much a fight for attention. The stakes are high; the top-two candidates in the nonpartisan race will face off in the November general election. Yet voters seem remarkably uninterested in the contest, perhaps because none of the candidates have the star quality of the last few Golden State governors (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jerry Brown, and Gavin Newsom). Hedge-fund billionaire Tom Steyer may have outspent the rest of the field combined, but he’s barely reaching double digits in the polls. Perhaps the best-known candidate, Representative Katie Porter, seems to have offended as many voters as she has attracted with her own attention-grabbing antics.
So it’s not particularly surprising that the Republican sheriff of Riverside County, Chad Bianco, has come up with a campaign stunt worthy of Donald Trump, whose endorsement he would probably welcome like manna from heaven. Sheriffs typically have nothing to do with running elections. But Bianco has let it be known that last month he seized the entire cache of Riverside County ballots (some 650,000 of them) cast in last year’s statewide special election. Why? Because some shadowy activist group claimed there were more ballots counted than cast. Outraged nonpartisan county election officials and statewide Democratic-election administrators and law-enforcement officials have all mocked Bianco’s gambit as a campaign-season stunt, as the New York Times reports:
Local election officials quickly dispelled the allegations, noting that they were rooted in a misunderstanding of how ballots are officially counted, according to The Palm Springs Desert Sun …
Shirley Weber, the Democratic secretary of state, denounced the investigation and said the claims made by Mr. Bianco were not backed by evidence. Moreover, a sheriff’s department was not properly equipped to conduct such an election review, she said …
Rob Bonta, the Democratic attorney general in California, issued a stern rebuke of Mr. Bianco’s investigation in a letter earlier this month, saying the office had “serious concerns” about the underlying evidence and that Mr. Bianco was “flagrantly violating my directives.”
Clearly, Bianco is answering to a higher authority than Bonta. His ballot-seizing action is very reminiscent of the Trump’s administration’s recent heist of 2020 ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, based on equally shadowy conspiracy theories. But unlike the voting in Georgia in 2020, the 2025 special election Bianco is questioning was not even remotely close. The sole item on the ballot, Gavin Newsom’s Prop 50 setting up a temporary congressional gerrymander to counter what Republicans were doing in Texas, passed by nearly a two-to-one margin (it won by a smaller but still decisive margin in Riverside County).
Cynics in both parties figure Bianco is aligning himself with MAGA election election deniers everywhere and perhaps seeking a shout-out from the boss himself. Bianco has been doing reasonably well in gubernatorial polls, currently running a close third behind fellow Republican (and former Fox News gabber) Steve Hilton and Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell in the RealClearPolitics polling averages. But Hilton has outspent Bianco by a significant margin and has also undermined the former Oath Keeper lawman’s MAGA street cred by calling attention to Bianco taking a knee alongside Black Lives Matter activists during a protest after George Floyd’s murder. So the Riverside sheriff needs a little pick-me-up.
Bianco may have a hidden strength in the race: Hilton and other Republicans need him to do well enough to block all the Democrats from a top-two finish in the primary since two Republicans making the general election is almost certainly the only way heavily Democratic California can elect a GOP governor. So if it takes a little bogus enthusiasm for a phony 2025 election “audit” by the Riverside sheriff to keep him viable in the race, that’s all to the good. If the boss gives Bianco an attaboy, he could be neck-and-neck with Hilton when voters vote in June, and maybe the warring Democrats will kill off each other’s candidacies.
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