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WASHINGTON, DC \u2013 MAY 15: Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County speaks during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on May 15, 2024 in Washington, DC. This week marks National Police Week, which sees thousands of police officers from departments across the country coming to Washington DC to honor law enforcement who died in the line of duty. (Photo by Kent Nishimura\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
When Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco seized 650,000 ballots<\/a> cast in California\u2019s recent redistricting referendum<\/a>, he opened a new front in the battle over the sanctity of election results.\u00a0<\/p>\n His shocking actions came just weeks after the FBI raided a Georgia election hub to seize 2020 election ballots<\/a> and subpoenaed files<\/a> related to the 2020 vote in Arizona.\u00a0<\/p>\n But whereas the FBI actions were clearly part of President Donald Trump\u2019s efforts to relitigate his loss in the 2020 presidential race, the Riverside County ballot seizure begged more basic questions: Who is Chad Bianco,\u00a0and why would a county sheriff want to challenge the results of a special election?<\/p>\n In fact, a closer look reveals that Bianco has a long history of hardline conservative statements and his ballot seizure fits clearly into the Republican Party\u2019s broader attack on free and fair elections.<\/p>\n Who is Chad Bianco?<\/p>\n Beyond being the sheriff of Riverside County, which stretches from eastern Los Angeles to the Arizona border, Bianco is currently the leading GOP candidate for governor of California.<\/p>\n That has led his opponents to view his attack on the 2025 redistricting referendum as a campaign strategy. During that special election, California voters overwhelmingly approved a new Congressional map to offset Trump\u2019s gerrymander gains in other states \u2014 particularly, in Texas.<\/p>\n But the seizure also stems from local anti-voting activism. Bianco took custody of the ballots as part of a criminal investigation based on a volunteer group\u2019s claims of an enormous discrepancy between ballots cast and ballots counted in the referendum.<\/p>\n But it appears that the volunteers simply misunderstood the raw election data<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bianco\u2019s hardline history<\/p>\n Even prior to the ballot seizure, Bianco had a history of aggressive rhetoric and hardline positions.<\/p>\n Earlier this month, in his capacity as a gubernatorial candidate, Bianco explicitly threatened<\/a> to dismantle California\u2019s government.<\/p>\n \u201cI am the antithesis to California state government,\u201d he told reporters, \u201cbecause I am going to take a nuclear bomb into that building and absolutely destroy everything that they do to us behind closed doors.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Bianco has also been linked for years to far-right groups, including the extremist Oath Keepers militia<\/a> and the \u201cconstitutional sheriffs\u201d movement<\/a>, which believes that local sheriffs have the supreme authority to interfere in elections<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n While he denounced the Oath Keepers\u2019 involvement in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol,\u00a0 Bianco has also defended the group, telling local media<\/a>: \u201cThey stand for protecting the Constitution.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n He was also named<\/a> the 2023 \u201cSheriff of the Year\u201d by the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank that trains sheriffs to battle \u201cwokeness.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n Prior to that, Bianco made headlines<\/a> in 2022 for appearing at a fundraiser with British anti-Muslim commentator Katie Hopkins.<\/p>\n After Bianco seized the Riverside County ballots, Democracy Docket found that he had made multiple statements on social media claiming that Democrats use illegal noncitizen voting and fraud to win elections. They echoed false claims made by Trump and other right-wing anti-voting activists.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s why some people should never be allowed to vote,\u201d Bianco posted on LinkedIn Wednesday in response to a video about the Iran war. He also commented that Democrats have \u201ccreated an environment where cheating and illegal voting is keeping them in office.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNon citizens can vote, you can vote for someone else even if they are dead, people can vote multiple times with different names,\u201d Bianco wrote in another post.\u00a0<\/p>\n Legal fight<\/p>\n In a lawsuit filed earlier this week, Riverside County voters are demanding the return of the ballots. Beyond taking aim at Bianco, they also slammed the county\u2019s voter registrar for handing over the ballots into the sheriff\u2019s custody without exhausting legal options to block the search warrants.<\/p>\n California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) has said<\/a> that the warrants \u201cfailed to meet even the most basic constitutional and statutory standards.\u201d<\/p>\n Bianco obtained the warrants from Superior Court Judge Jay Kiel, whose social media posts proudly boast Bianco\u2019s campaign endorsement.<\/p>\n In a podcast interview with Tim Thompson, an evangelical pastor who campaigned<\/a> alongside Eric Trump to elect right-wing Christians to local school boards, Kiel praised Riverside County as a conservative outlier in the state.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the Texas of California,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not entirely conservative. Though some county officials have remained quiet about the controversial investigation, Riverside County Supervisor Jose Medina (D) immediately demanded<\/a> Bianco return the ballots, telling him to find another campaign stunt.<\/p>\n Instead, Bianco has only doubled down on his partisan talking points.<\/p>\n \u201cThis isn\u2019t about counting yes and no votes. This is simply counting the total ballots and comparing that total with the number of votes reported by the Dominion machines,\u201d Bianco said in a social media video this week, drawing a link to the machines at the center<\/a> of the FBI\u2019s similarly conspiracy theory-fueled election raid in Georgia.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s it going to be?\u201d Bianco continued. \u201cLet law enforcement count the ballots as part of a lawful investigation, or halt the investigation and sweep it under the rug?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON, DC \u2013 MAY 15: Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County speaks during a news conference at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":240677,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-240676","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-california","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-california-headlines","10":"tag-california-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240676\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}