California Attorney General Rob Bonta speaks to reporters outside the Supreme Court on Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

The California Attorney General’s office has asked a court to immediately pause a Republican county sheriff’s investigation into last year’s redistricting referendum election, arguing his seizure of more than 650,000 ballots “threatens to create a dangerous precedent.”

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco’s move to take custody of the ballots is the third major attack on elections in recent weeks, following the FBI’s conspiracy-fueled raid of a Georgia elections office and an FBI subpoena seeking documents related to an Arizona election audit, which both focused on the 2020 presidential vote. 

But a local law enforcement officer seizing all ballots cast in an election is “unprecedented in state history,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) said.  

Bonta filed the lawsuit Monday night in state appellate court, asking the court to issue an immediate stay of the investigation behind the ballot seizure and to compel Bianco to comply with his office’s orders.

“The Sheriff’s actions — launching an unprecedented criminal investigation into the special election without identifying any particular crime that may have been committed by anyone, and openly defying the Attorney General’s lawful directives — demand immediate judicial intervention,” the filing said. 

Bianco, a GOP candidate for governor of California, announced Friday that his office had seized more than 650,000 ballots and would conduct its own hand count based on local activists’ complaints about an alleged vote discrepancy in the Proposition 50 special election. That discrepancy resulted from misinterpretations of raw, unprocessed election data, according to the county’s top election official. 

Riverside County voted in favor of the proposition, which allowed Democrats to redraw the state’s congressional map in response to President Donald Trump’s gerrymandering gains in Texas. 

Bianco also revealed that his office already attempted to begin counting the ballots, but the count was halted and will restart under the supervision of the court. 

According to the sheriff, “the search warrants are all sealed,” and a Riverside superior court judge issued an order Thursday to appoint a special master to oversee counting the ballots.

In court filings, Bonta’s office slammed Bianco for not following the attorney general’s orders related to the investigation and said Bianco had begun conducting “an amateur and dubious ‘recount’ of the number of votes that were included in the final certified results.” 

“On March 19, 2026, without notifying the Attorney General, the Sheriff went to court again and obtained an additional search warrant that purports to require a recount of the seized ballots,” the filing said. “The application for this warrant not only violated the Attorney General’s unambiguous directive, but it was also so facially insufficient that it failed to meet even the most basic constitutional and statutory standards, most notably that it did not allege the commission of a crime.” 

Bonta’s office is asking the court to quash the March 19 warrant issued by Judge Jay Kiel as “legally insufficient” or stay further execution of the warrant, arguing that all three warrants obtained by Bianco’s office “suffer from serious legal deficiencies” but the first two warrants are largely complete, while the third warrant “to conduct a recount” is still pending. 

The attorney general’s office argued the March 19 search warrant failed to allege a felony crime was committed and lacked probable cause. 

According to the filing, California law provides a mechanism for investigating potential vote-counting errors — an election contest. But no election contest was initiated in Riverside County. 

Instead, Bianco’s office obtained a criminal search warrant on Feb. 9, and another on Feb. 23. And despite receiving orders from Bonta’s office to delay execution of the warrants to allow the attorney general’s office to better understand the investigation, Bianco accelerated the timeline and seized the ballots, the filing said. 

Bianco’s seizure of his county’s Prop 50 ballots didn’t come out of the blue. Trump previously claimed the vote was a “GIANT SCAM” that merited investigation.

In social media posts on the day of the special election, the president wrote: “All ‘Mail-In’ Ballots, where the Republicans in that State are ‘Shut Out,’ is under very serious legal and criminal review.”