{"id":442433,"date":"2026-08-24T23:38:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T23:38:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/442433\/"},"modified":"2026-08-24T23:38:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T23:38:13","slug":"california-supreme-court-appears-skeptical-of-sheriffs-ballot-seizure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/442433\/","title":{"rendered":"California Supreme Court appears skeptical of sheriff’s ballot seizure"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

California Supreme Court justices hammered Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco<\/a> over his seizure of hundreds of thousands of Proposition 50 ballots<\/a> in a pair of back-to-back hearings on Monday, appearing poised to order the ballots returned and sharply limit the sheriff\u2019s power to snatch similar election materials in the future. <\/p>\n

Bianco, a Republican who came in fourth in this spring\u2019s crowded California gubernatorial primary, carted off truckloads of ballots from the Riverside County Registrar of Voters in February, after securing a warrant based on claims that the office allowed fraudulent votes in the special election to redraw California\u2019s congressional districts last fall. <\/p>\n

According to a sworn declaration by one of Bianco\u2019s sergeants, armed deputies from Riverside County\u2019s Special Investigations Bureau, Emergency Response Team and SWAT unit were sent to sweep up pallets of sealed votes and bring them to the Moreno Valley Sheriff\u2019s Station on Feb. 26 \u2014 a day after California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and Secretary of State Shirley Weber ordered Bianco to stand down. <\/p>\n

In the days that followed, deputies began their own ad hoc recount \u2014 an activity they\u2019d never been trained for, and which state officials and civil liberties groups say flies in the face of the plain language of the state\u2019s election law that says \u201cin no event shall ballots be moved.\u201d <\/p>\n

Voters sued. So did Bonta. In oral arguments on both cases Monday morning, California\u2018s seven Supreme Court justices appeared at times flabbergasted by claims that the move was not only permitted but blessed under state law \u2014 and that California\u2019s top cop had no power to block it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m just wondering … why didn\u2019t the sheriff\u2019s office contemplate the available routes under the elections code for resolving the alleged disparity?\u201d asked Associate Justice Goodwin H. Liu. \u201cIsn\u2019t there a procedure for resolving this?\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cCertainly there are other paths,\u201d said Bianco\u2019s attorney, Bradley W. Hertz.<\/p>\n

Hertz, who argued the sheriff\u2019s case after Riverside\u2019s county counsel largely sided with the plaintiffs, said Bianco simply exercised his legal discretion. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis wasn\u2019t come in with guns blaring and take the documents,\u201d Hertz said. <\/p>\n

The dispute began over handwritten notes made as part of an experimental program to increase voter confidence in the county\u2019s election procedures. That informal tally fell about 46,000 votes short of the official count, prompting accusations of fraud. <\/p>\n

Officials contend the discrepancy between the computer count and the paper tally is \u201ca good deed that went punished\u201d \u2014 the result of exhausted officials being handed an extra-credit project they couldn\u2019t quite execute.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a pilot program that the registrar implemented at the request of the public, on top of all their other duties, to do these handwritten logs to try to track 350,000 pieces of mail that come in,\u201d said Dale Larson, who represented Riverside County Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco at the hearing. <\/p>\n

Both times it was attempted, the hand tally produced a significant undercount, prompting officials to cancel the pilot, Larson said. <\/p>\n

Bianco and his allies insist the difference is evidence of maleficence, and that criminal law authorizes the sheriff to sidestep the state\u2019s detailed election code and the attorney general\u2019s sweeping authority to get to the bottom of it. <\/p>\n

The justices repeatedly pressed on Hertz to explain how the general authority conferred to the sheriff under criminal law could trump the specificity of the state\u2019s election rules \u2014 a position that would seem to upend foundational rules of American law. <\/p>\n

They also cast doubt on Bianco\u2019s \u201ccounterintuitive\u201d claim that Bonta\u2019s \u201csupervisory\u201d role over the state\u2019s elected sheriffs was merely advisory and did not carry the authority of law. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not just counterintiitive \u2014 again, we\u2019ve said a million times, we\u2019ve got to just look at the plain language,\u201d said Associate Justice Joshua P. Groban. \u201cNobody would think that\u2019s what \u2018supervised\u2019 means, so why should we think that here?\u201d <\/p>\n

The court battle has played out with the American Civil Liberties Union bringing the suit on behalf of voters, and the Riverside County district attorney\u2019s Office and the California State Sheriffs\u2019 Assn. backing many of Bianco\u2019s claims. <\/p>\n

But it has also pitted the sheriff against the registrar, who was named as a co-defendent in the ACLU suit despite siding with plaintiffs in all but a narrow subset of its claims. <\/p>\n

In court filings, Riverside County Counsel Minh C. Tran co-signed claims that Bonta and the voters had it right, carving out a narrow disagreement over whether Tinoco should have ignored the sealed warrant and faced arrest rather than allow ballots to be taken. They also questioned whether he was obligated to go to court himself to stop the seizure. <\/p>\n

The ACLU hit back at that claim, saying it was \u201cthe responsibility of the registrar to go to jail rather than hand over the ballots.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI know that\u2019s strong medicine,\u201d said Chad W. Dunn of the ACLU\u2019s Voting Rights Project. \u201cThe registrar has a duty to announce publicly and get into court immediately, or at least allow the public to get into court immediately to contest the movement of ballots before it occurs.\u201d <\/p>\n

The decision looms as the Trump administration has moved to restrict mail-in voting and signaled it could contest results of the upcoming midterms \u2014 partisan flash points the ACLU urged the court to address. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis is bound to be repeated again,\u201d Dunn said. \u201cThese are the public\u2019s ballots, that\u2019s why the election code is crafted the way it is, so that the public have a right to weigh in.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"California Supreme Court justices hammered Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco over his seizure of hundreds of thousands of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":442434,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[175260,6577,107297,16854,7,9,8,2081,8863,161834,175262,346,175261,2637,225,7827,1522],"class_list":["post-442433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-aclu-suit","tag-authority","tag-ballot-seizure","tag-bianco","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-california-supreme-court","tag-claim","tag-court-battle","tag-fraudulent-vote","tag-office","tag-riverside-county-registrar","tag-sheriff","tag-state","tag-state-official","tag-voter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442433","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=442433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442433\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/442434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}