State officials, election experts question California sheriff’s seizure of ballots

A California county sheriff and Republican contender for the state’s gubernatorial race has seized 650,000 physical ballots from Riverside County, saying they were part of an investigation into election fraud tied to redistricting wars.

State officials and election security experts say that the underlying allegations are spurious and local law enforcement do not have the authority to unilaterally investigate or validate election results.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco said at a news conference Friday that he intended to conduct a hand count of the ballots, which were tied to elections last November, and “compare that result to the total votes recorded.”

In a March 6 letter, California Attorney General Rob Bonta directed Bianco to pause the investigation until the state could review “the factual and legal basis” for the probe and seizure.

Based on an initial review of the warrants and affidavits in the case, Bonta wrote that his “office has serious concerns as to whether probable cause existed to support the issuance of the warrants, and whether your office presented the magistrate with all available evidence as required by law.” 

While Bonta’s letter does not describe the underlying content of the search warrants, it points to a public presentation made by a resident at a Feb. 10 Riverside County Registrar of Voters meeting that “addresses the alleged vote discrepancy that appears to be the basis of your investigation.”

In that meeting, an individual identifying himself as “Errol” — wearing a “Trump 2028” hat — alleged the council had participated in local, state and federal election fraud.

At several points, the individual said he relied on Google for information on individuals and companies he was accusing of receiving improper payments. At another point, he claimed the Riverside County auditor would not disclose the purpose behind thousands of pages of county payments, before saying “you’re not getting the files, I got them put away.”

“We have a lot of problems, you guys. You’ve committed serious fraud here, forever,” the individual alleged, adding that he hoped the members of the council were imprisoned.

Bonta accused Bianco of “flagrantly violating my directives” under the California State Constitution, and threatened court action should he proceed with the investigation and hand recount.

The act by Bianco — who is running third in the state’s open primary for governor this month, per an Emerson College poll — is the second such seizure of ballots to take place this election cycle, following the FBI’s raid of Fulton County, Georgia’s election office.

Gowri Ramachandran, director of elections and security at the Brennan Center for Justice, told CyberScoop that the election allegedly being investigated wasn’t a close race. Further, like virtually every other election, candidates or parties have opportunities to contest irregularities or results, including automatic recounts or recounts paid by candidates or campaigns — along with state courts that regularly adjudicate questions of election outcomes.

“It’s important for people to know none of those processes involve someone coming in and haphazardly coming in and grabbing the ballots,” she said, adding: “I worry if it happens closer to an actual election what it could do to interfere with it.”

Ramachandran said that by seizing physical ballots, which she called “the gold standard” we use for determining ground-level truth about voter intent, Bianco was disrupting the chain of custody that is one of the key processes designed to give voters trust in their elections.

“It should just be a really high bar, not just, ‘I’m suspicious, I want to do a fishing expedition,’” she said. “That’s not enough to have someone who doesn’t have any experience in counting ballots or keeping them safe [to] just come in and grab all that stuff.”

Bonta’s suggestion that Bianco did not materially inform the courts echoes what Fulton County officials alleged in their own lawsuit, which accused the FBI of presenting the judge with a “flagrantly misleading narrative” that omitted key evidence, undermining the government’s basis for investigating the 2020 ballots.