Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco speaks during a California Chamber of Commerce panel discussion with candidates for California governor at the SAFE Credit Union Convention Center in Sacramento on Wednesday, June 4, 2025.
PAUL KITAGAKI JR.
pkitagaki@sacbee.com
The UCLA Voting Rights Project and former Attorney General Xavier Becerra have asked the California Supreme Court to force Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco to return 650,000 seized ballots, claiming the Republican sheriff’s ongoing voter fraud investigation is a ploy to bolster his campaign for governor.
Earlier this month, Bianco’s office seized over 1,000 boxes of ballots cast in the November 2025 special election after a local group claimed elections officials had inflated vote tallies, which Riverside County Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco denied.
UCLA Voting Rights Project and Becerra, who is running for governor as a Democrat, petitioned the state’s highest court on Thursday, naming both Bianco and Tinoco as defendants in their 48-page filing. They are asking the court to force Bianco to return the ballots to local elections officials, accusing the sheriff of seeking “public attention to himself and his campaign for governor,” and that despite his claims to be on a “fact-finding mission,” his investigation is “in direct violation of the law and outside the eyes of the public.”
“Petitioners—voters who validly cast ballots in the 2025 Special Election—now have no expectation that the privacy of their ballot will be respected, or that it will be accurately tabulated. Any ‘count’ Bianco may announce as part of this gambit is now tainted,” they wrote. “The out-of-view manipulation of approximately 600,000 ballots cast in a statewide election is a matter of statewide and urgent importance. This Court should immediately order the protection of these election materials, as required by law.”
The plaintiffs include Riverside City Councilmember Clarissa Cervantes, Indio City Councilmember Oscar Ortiz, and campaign consultant Nathan Kempe, who are all Democrats. Cervantes is the sister of Sen. Sabrina Cervantes, D-Riverside.
Neither Bianco’s campaign nor the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office immediately responded to requests for comment.
The sheriff, a longtime supporter of President Donald Trump and one-time member of the Oath Keepers militia, seized the ballots earlier this month after the so-called Riverside Election Integrity Team complained that election officials logged 45,000 more votes than there were ballots. The Trump administration has tried to access or sued to gain access to voter records in almost every state and Washington, D.C., which experts have said is a precursor to mass voter disenfranchisement and surveillance.
Bianco said his office seized the ballots after obtaining search warrants from Riverside Superior Court Judge Jay Kiel, whose 2022 campaign Bianco endorsed and with whom he shares donors and political allies. UCLA cited those ties in its filing.
Tinoco’s office said the Riverside group relied on faulty data to reach its conclusion of voting irregularities. Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office sent Bianco’s office three letters ordering him to stop his investigation and claiming in an emergency petition earlier this week the investigation was “little more than a fishing expedition” to sow distrust in elections.
On Tuesday, a three-judge panel for the state Fourth District Court of Appeal in Riverside denied Bonta’s petition, ruling that the petition should have been filed in a Riverside County court.
Bianco responded by disparaging Bonta as an “embarrassment to law enforcement” in a video posted to social media.
Polls show he and fellow Republican Steve Hilton are leading in the race to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is termed out of office and cannot run again after this year. The state Democratic Party called upon lower-polling candidates to drop out of the race to prevent Bianco and Hilton from claiming the top two spots in the June 2 primary and locking Democrats out of a runoff in November.
Becerra has failed to gain much traction after he launched his campaign last April, and his former aide pleaded guilty last fall to federal charges for siphoning campaign funds from him. A recent state party poll put Becerra at 3% support, while 24% of voters remain undecided.
Voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50 in the Nov. 4 special election, which redrew California’s congressional districts to favor Democrats in response to Texas Republicans after President Donald Trump asked them to redistrict to insure the GOP held on to its congressional majority. In Riverside County, voters passed Prop. 50 by 82,570 votes, according to election data from the Secretary of State.
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Lia Russell covers California’s governor for The Sacramento Bee’s Capitol Bureau. Originally from San Francisco, Lia previously worked for The Baltimore Sun and the Bangor Daily News in Maine.