Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a leading candidate for California governor, campaigned for Judge Jay Kiel in 2022, who later signed warrants allowing Bianco’s office to seize more than half a million ballots.
Paul Kitagaki Jr./TNS
The judge who approved a request for Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco to seize more than 650,000 ballots last month touted the sheriff’s endorsement before he was first elected in 2022, and spoke glowingly about Bianco on a podcast in the run-up to the election that year. The two men also share other key political backers and donors.
Bianco’s controversial probe into the November election in Riverside County has kept his name in the headlines as he campaigns for governor. Bianco has touted the warrants Riverside County Superior Court Judge Jay Kiel signed as evidence of his investigation’s legitimacy.
“The judge thinks it should be counted,” Bianco told the Chronicle Tuesday, referring to Kiel’s signature on a March 19 warrant for sheriff’s officials to begin hand-counting hundreds of thousands of seized ballots under the supervision of a court-chosen special master.
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Asked about obtaining warrants from a judge he has endorsed and who endorsed him, Bianco lambasted Democrats and distanced himself from his office’s election investigation.
“The only reason Democrats believe that politics is involved is because that is their entire life,” he said. While saying that his investigators initiated the probe, he added, “This is about investigations into elections fraud and elections irregularities that have been going on since 2022. … But I play absolutely no part in it.”
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Bianco’s investigation and his stated reasons for it have been contested and condemned by local and state election officials and election law scholars who say it resembles FBI raids of elections offices in Georgia and Arizona. California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued Monday to stop Bianco’s hand count.
California Democrats’ crowded field of gubernatorial candidates has allowed Bianco to hover around second place in polls, despite being a Republican with very little name recognition or funds in a deep blue state.
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The relationship between Bianco and Kiel — as well as their mutual connections to 412 Church Temecula Valley senior pastor Tim Thompson — represents a new wrinkle for the already controversial investigation.
Sean McMorris of California Common Cause, a pro-democracy organization, said the investigation itself raises alarms because it’s happening outside of the well-established framework for election recounts.
“The way it’s been handled is quite concerning. It’s not happening under the normal processes,” he said. “I think the public legitimately has concerns about why it’s happening and the legitimacy of it.”
Being a political supporter of someone doesn’t make a judge biased, per se, but judges have an obligation to recuse themselves when they have a conflict that could bias their judgment, McMorris said. That’s important, in part, because even the perception of bias can undermine the integrity of the judicial branch.
“Judges have to be particularly vigilant about not just real bias, but perceived bias when there’s political connections like this,” he said. “You have to be cognizant of what the public might perceive based on the connections a particular judge may have to an elected official or a law enforcement officer that is asking them for something.”
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Bonta has raised concerns about Bianco’s justification for the investigation, alleging in three letters to the sheriff and in a challenge filed Monday in the Court of Appeal that the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office failed to establish probable cause, a basic legal threshold for obtaining a warrant.
In its emergency petition seeking to halt Bianco’s investigation, Bonta’s office called the investigation “unprecedented in state history” and said that a review of the sheriff’s office’s probable cause affidavits “indicates the absence of any legally sufficient basis for Sheriff Respondents’ actions.”
But the appeals court rejected Bonta’s challenge Tuesday in a brief order, saying the attorney general could instead file his arguments in superior court, where such cases generally begin.
His office said he wasn’t giving up.
“The facts have not changed,” said Nina Sheridan, a spokesperson for Bonta. “The Riverside County sheriff continues to directly defy the attorney general’s instructions, in violation of the California Constitution and state law. … We are evaluating next steps to ensure a swift and appropriate resolution to this matter.”
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At a Friday news conference, Bianco called the investigation “a fact-finding mission” whose purpose “is just as much to prove the election is accurate as it is to show otherwise.”
Bianco reiterated that message Tuesday, telling the Chronicle, “I want the numbers to match exactly.”
“Oh wow,” Gowri Ramachandran, director of elections and security at the Brennan Center for Justice and a former law professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, said upon hearing Bianco’s remark. “I would call that a fishing expedition. … that doesn’t justify taking the custody of the ballots out of the hands of the people approved to have them.”
The central claim underpinning the investigation comes from a local group that calls itself the Riverside Election Integrity Team. Made up of conservative election skeptics, the group asserts that 45,000 more votes were counted in the November election, in which California voters overwhelmingly approved the redistricting measure Prop 50, than ballots were cast.
But local election officials have repeatedly disputed the group’s math, saying it’s based on a misguided comparison of raw, hand-counted ballots rather than official machine counts by two independent systems.
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REIT members and Bianco say they don’t trust the machines.
“What if the humans didn’t error? What if the machines errored? That is why they have to be counted,” Bianco said, repeating a conspiratorial argument of the election denial movement. “There is already evidence that the machines can be manipulated to come up with different numbers.”
In California’s primary election, all candidates compete together and the top two votegetters advance to the general election, regardless of party. Bianco and former Fox News host Steve Hilton, also a Republican, sit at the top of most polls, raising concerns among Democrats that they could shut Democrats out of the election.
On Monday evening, responding to Bonta’s efforts in court to halt the investigation, Bianco posted a video on social media in which he introduced himself as both the sheriff and “your next governor.”
“The political corruption in California just gets bigger and bigger,” he said, criticizing Bonta’s efforts to block his investigation. “Not only did a Superior Court judge approve a warrant to obtain the ballots, but also issued a separate order to count them. Why in the world would Bonta want that count stopped unless he was afraid of what that count would uncover. We have an extremely politically biased appeals court, so this is going to be interesting.”
Kiel and Bianco have both been podcast guests of Thompson, the founder of 412 Church Temecula Valley, an influential evangelical church with a powerful political action committee, Inland Empire Family, credited with getting an evangelical majority elected to the Temecula Valley school board.
In his 2022 interview on Thompson’s podcast, in which Thompson said he hoped Kiel would be elected, Kiel spoke glowingly about Bianco.
“We’re so fortunate to have Chad Bianco,” he told Thompson.
In his 2022 interview with Thompson, Kiel said he thought it was a problem that the heavily Democratic Legislature in Sacramento makes “one-sided” decisions and said judges should provide a counter-weight to them.
“That’s one of the reasons that we’re running,” he said, referencing himself and other deputy district attorneys running as a slate of judicial candidates. “We’re trying to bring balance back to the bench.”
In the interview, Kiel praised Bianco and District Attorney Mike Hestrin. “People should vote for this slate by just looking at our background, who we are endorsed by,” Kiel said, listing Bianco and Hestrin as well as some law enforcement organizations.
The Riverside Sheriffs’ Association Public Education Fund, which has also endorsed Bianco for governor, was the second-largest donor to Kiel’s 2022 campaign with a $10,000 contribution.
Kiel did not immediately respond to questions from the Chronicle about why he approved the warrant and whether Bianco’s endorsement of his 2022 campaign influenced his decision.
Michael Gomez Daly, political director for the progressive California Donor Table, which has endorsed Democrat Tom Steyer in the governor’s race, said he was surprised that a judge approved Bianco’s probe in the first place and that he believes the personal connection between the two men must have played a role.
“The impact this could have on the election and the bump this may give Bianco is very concerning,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any way to interpret this (other) than Judge Jay Kiel was doing this to help a friend.”
San Francisco attorney James A. Murphy said California law outlines three general instances in which judges should recuse themselves, including if their recusal furthers the interests of justice, if there is substantial doubt about their ability to be impartial or if a reasonable person might doubt their ability to be impartial.
That last standard “would likely be the basis for any attempt to remove the judge who issued the warrant,” Murphy said.
In a nearly 30-minute interview with the Chronicle, Bianco aligned himself with President Donald Trump’s vision to greatly restrict voting. The president has called for doing away with voting by mail and wants to require every American voter to re-register with proof-of-citizenship documents that, according to election law experts, could disenfranchise married women who changed their last names, students and people of color.
Bianco also repeated the unfounded claim that unauthorized immigrants had frequently voted in elections. Asked where his certainty came from, he interjected.
“Oh my God, stop, oh my God, stop, this is an absolute fact,” he said. “We absolutely know that illegal aliens are voting. … There’s no point in us even having a conversation again.”
Bob Egelko contributed reporting.