California’s Top Court Must Stop a Sheriff Who Seized 650,000 Ballots on a Debunked Conspiracy

A county sheriff seized 650,000 ballots from an election he didn’t like the results of. He hauled them to a law enforcement facility, outside public view, and his deputies started opening boxes and counting. This is not a paragraph from a authoritarian state’s manual. This happened in California, in 2026, and the man who did it is still walking around with a badge.

Riversville County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican who ran for governor and lost, took three search warrants built on a claim so thin it dissolves on contact. A right-wing group called the Riverside Election Integrity Team said 45,896 physical ballots were missing from the November 2025 redistricting referendum. Riverside County Registrar Art Tinoco publicly explained the group was comparing different data sets and using preliminary numbers. The actual discrepancy? About 103 ballots out of 657,322. That is 0.016%. That is a rounding error. That is nothing.

Thomas Bros (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons

Bianco seized the ballots anyway. When Attorney General Rob Bonta told him to pause the investigation, Bianco’s response was to seize roughly 1,000 more boxes that same day. One of his own sergeants said in a sworn declaration that deputies unsealed ballot boxes and spent two hours counting before Bianco called and told them to stop. Two hours of untrained hands on ballots that California law says must remain in the custody of election officials. The law is explicit: “in no event” may ballot packages be taken from election officials. Not “unless a sheriff has a hunch.” Not “unless a right-wing group spreads a rumor.” In no event.

California built its election safeguards for exactly this scenario. Riverside County livestreamed its ballot counting. The public could watch. After Bianco grabbed the boxes, that transparency vanished. Ballots were handled in a sheriff’s facility with no cameras, no trained personnel, no public observation. Every safeguard designed to prevent tampering was stripped away by a man chasing a conspiracy theory he still cannot substantiate.

The California Supreme Court now hears two cases that should never have been necessary. Four voters sued to get their ballots back. Bonta sued to assert the authority the California Constitution already gives him as chief law enforcement officer: direct supervision over county sheriffs. The court ordered Bianco to halt in April. Lawmakers passed a new law banning unlawful seizures of ballots and election materials. And yet here we are, arguing whether a sheriff can override the entire election infrastructure of the state because a fringe group fed him bad math.

National Museum of American History. Original uploader was Electiontechnology a (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons

This is the playbook. Manufacture a discrepancy. Get a warrant. Seize the evidence. Handle it in secret. Claim you are investigating fraud while you are the one compromising the chain of custody. It is happening in California, and it is happening at the federal level, where the DOJ is begging the Supreme Court to let Trump’s mail voting restrictions take effect before lower courts can finish blocking them. The machinery is the same: use the language of integrity to dismantle the structures that actually protect elections.

The California Supreme Court must order the ballots returned to the registrar and affirm Bonta’s authority to shut down rogue sheriffs. Anything less tells every election denier with a badge that the safeguards are optional and the ballots are theirs for the taking.