Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco faces criticism for seizing ballots in a November 2025 election probe, sparking fears it might undermine public trust.
RIVERSIDE COUNTY, Calif. — A Southern California sheriff has seized more than 600,000 ballots as part of an investigation into alleged discrepancies in the November 2025 special election for Prop 50, drawing sharp criticism from state officials who question the probe’s basis and warn it could undermine public trust.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican candidate for governor, announced Friday that his office is examining claims that ballots may have been miscounted in his county.
“It is basically a fact-finding mission,” Bianco said.
The investigation centers on figures from the Riverside County Registrar of Voters, which administers local elections. Bianco said an audit of handwritten logs maintained by the office shows 611,428 ballots were cast, while 657,322 votes were reported and certified to the state — a difference of 45,896.
He said the calculation was conducted by a group of citizen volunteers who obtained the records through a public records request.
“We don’t know what we’re going to find until we count those ballots,” Bianco said.
Riverside County’s Registrar of Voters explained the discrepancy in a report to the Board of Supervisors at its Feb. 10 meeting.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber said the allegations “lack credible evidence and risk undermining public confidence in our elections.”
Bianco said the investigation is not intended to prove fraud but to verify the results.
“The purpose of this investigation is just as much to prove the election is accurate as it is to show otherwise,” he said. “We will not know until the count is complete.”
In letters sent from late February through early March, California Attorney General Rob Bonta urged Bianco to pause the investigation, calling it “unprecedented in scope and scale” and warning it could erode confidence in state elections.
At the same time, Bonta said his office takes concerns about potential election irregularities seriously and needs time to review the issues before the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office takes further steps.
Asked about those concerns, Bianco said the investigation would only undermine trust if it revealed inaccuracies in vote counting.
“What undermines the public trust in elections is the Attorney General trying to stop it from happening,” he said.
Gowri Ramachandran is Director of Elections and Security at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law. She compares Bianco’s seizure of ballots to Trump doing the same in Fulton County, Georgia earlier this year—in search of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
“It looks like in both cases, the investigations are being driven by claims from activists that have already been investigated or addressed,” she wrote in a thread on Bluesky. “These ballot seizures are setting a dangerous precedent. States provide a variety of methods with preset procedures for confirming an election result, and for disputing it afterwards.”
Bianco rejected those comparisons.
“Every single one of those arguments is simply made to somehow make the public mistrust me, label me as being somehow associated with the federal government or with President Trump, and it’s just absolutely wrong,” he said. “My investigation is based on fact and common sense.”
The Attorney General’s office said Bianco seized about 1,000 boxes of ballots and raised concerns about “legal deficiencies” in the affidavits used to obtain the warrants, including the omission of material facts. The office said the matter is ongoing and additional action may be taken.
Bianco said a Riverside County judge has ordered that a ‘special master’ oversee the ballot-counting process. His office is working with the court to select that person. Only then may the counting begin.
He said the review will focus only on the number of ballots received, not the votes themselves, and expects the process to begin soon.
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