Sheriff Bianco Seizes 650,000 Ballots in Riverside County

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco seized 650,000 ballots last week from the November 2025 election, triggering alarm from state officials who say the move is baseless and potentially damaging to public confidence ahead of this fall’s midterm elections.

Bianco, a Republican who is running for governor and has made his loyalty to Donald Trump a central feature of his political identity, ordered the seizure after a group calling itself the Riverside Election Integrity Team claimed it found a discrepancy between polling workers’ initial vote estimates and the final recorded tally for Proposition 50. The group alleged an excess of 45,000 votes.

“This investigation is simple,” Bianco said at a news conference Friday. “Physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes reported.”

The problem, according to both state and local election officials, is that the discrepancy does not exist in any meaningful sense. Riverside elections official Art Tinoco told the county’s board of supervisors that the initial count cited by the integrity group was never meant to be a precise figure. It is a rough estimate made by polling workers in the field. The final tally differed from that estimate by 103 votes, a margin of 0.16 percent.

There is also the broader question of stakes. Proposition 50 passed statewide by a wide margin. Even if Riverside County’s results contained some irregularity, which officials say the evidence does not support, the outcome of the measure would not change.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber was direct in her criticism. “The Riverside County Sheriff’s Office has taken actions based on allegations that lack credible evidence and risk undermining public confidence in our elections,” Weber said in a statement. “The sheriff’s assertion that his deputies know how to count is admirable. The fact remains that he and his deputies are not elections officials, and they do not have expertise in election administration.”

Attorney General Rob Bonta, whom Bianco accused of trying to illegally interfere in the investigation, pushed back hard. In a letter to Bianco, Bonta wrote: “Let me be clear: this is unacceptable. Your decision to seize ballots and begin counting them outside the established legal framework is not a lawful exercise of your authority.”

Riverside County Executive Officer Jeff Van Wagenen defended his staff. “County election staff follow detailed procedures established by state and federal law to protect the integrity of the vote and to ensure that every eligible ballot is processed and counted in accordance with those legal requirements,” he said in a statement to the New York Times.

Democrats are framing Bianco’s actions as something more than a stunt. With November 2026 midterms approaching, they argue that high-profile ballot seizures built on discredited claims sow the kind of doubt that suppresses voter participation and erodes trust in results that don’t go a certain direction. That playbook is familiar by now, and California Democrats are clearly not inclined to let it move forward unchallenged.

For Bianco, the political calculus seems straightforward enough. A sheriff making noise about election fraud generates Fox News coverage and signals to a Republican primary base that he is willing to go to the mat for Trump-aligned grievances. His gubernatorial campaign puts him in a crowded field where standing out requires exactly this kind of provocation.

What he is asking voters to believe requires ignoring the officials who actually run elections, the data those officials have provided, and the basic math of a statewide measure that passed decisively. It also requires a sheriff’s department to substitute itself for election administrators with no legal basis for doing so.

California’s election code is not ambiguous about who has authority over ballots once they are cast. That authority does not run through the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office. State officials are now in a legal confrontation with Bianco over whether those ballots get returned, how the recount process unfolds, and what limits actually apply to a sheriff who has decided that performing election skepticism is good for his political future.

The midterms are seven months away. The precedent being set here will matter well before November.