The November election results were not close in Riverside County, California. That didn’t stop the county’s Republican sheriff from seizing more than half a million ballots and casting doubt on a lopsided outcome that election officials say is sound.
In America’s latest battle over ballots, a citizens group alleges nearly 46,000 more votes were counted than cast, prompting the seizure of the ballots. Election officials and experts say the claims are based on a misreading of preliminary data and there’s no reason to doubt the results.
The sheriff’s plan to count the ballots has been halted for now after voters and the Democratic state attorney general sued.
The fight stems from a state ballot measure that gave Democrats a chance to gain five more seats in the narrowly divided U.S. House. The measure passed by 56 percent in Riverside County and 64 percent statewide.
The dispute comes two months before California’s primary for governor — an office Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco is seeking. Bianco told The Washington Post he would consider seizing ballots in the primary too if questions are raised about how it is conducted.
By historical measures, the situation is highly unusual. Election disputes are typically resolved through publicly conducted recounts or litigation filed under state election laws — not through ballot seizures by criminal investigators.
But in another sense, it’s part of an anything-goes phenomenon that has emerged in recent years when it comes to fighting election losses. Allies of President Donald Trump have concocted far-fetched legal theories to try to overturn results, conducted unorthodox reviews of elections and tried to get their hands on voting machines. In recent months, the FBI has taken possession of ballots in Georgia and a trove of election data in Arizona, and Trump has sought to restrictwho can receive ballots through the mail.
Election disputes often erupt in swing states, but this one has surfaced in an unusual spot. Riverside County includes 2.5 million residents and stretches from the edge of Los Angeles to California’s border with Arizona. Democrats won the county in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections; Trump won it in 2024.
The sheriff’s investigation has alarmed election officials around the country who say election administrators must maintain control of ballots and voting machines to ensure no one tampers with them. Bianco said he’s engaging in the ordinary work of law enforcement.
The investigation plays into narratives about rigged elections that Trump has long stoked even though voting fraud is rare. It’s also steeped in politics, in part because of Bianco’s run for governor. One of the lawsuits against him was brought by Xavier Becerra, who served as President Joe Biden’s health secretary and is running for governor as a Democrat.
California has a multiparty primary in June. The two who perform best, regardless of party, will advance to the November general election. Trump on Monday endorsed former Fox News host Steve Hilton, which will probably shift Republican votes his way and make it harder for Bianco to get one of the top two spots in the primary.
After the November vote for the redistricting measure, a group called the Riverside Election Integrity Team conducted a review of the election based on public records. It concluded the county had counted 46,000 more ballots than it had received. The county’s registrar of voters, Art Tinoco, said in a February presentation to the county board of supervisors that the group had misunderstood “raw data” from the county.
A separate review by Tinoco’s office found the county had counted 657,322 ballots, 103 more than the number of people recorded as having voted. That’s an error rate of 0.016 percent, better than many other California counties.
The citizens group, which consists of about 10 core members and dozens of other volunteers, stood by its findings and urged a more detailed look at the county’s paper ballots.
The organization reviewed paperwork filled out by hand that showed how many ballots had been received each day by mail, at voting centers and in ballot drop boxes, said Greg Langworthy, a leader of the group. Langworthy wants to know why the group found such a large mismatch.
“This is so simple,” Langworthy said in an interview. “It’s like balancing your checkbook. You’ve just got to get all your deposit slips, count them up, and then compare that with the total in your bank.”
Langworthy’s group took its findings to Bianco, who secured court warrants to seize about 1,000 boxes of ballots. He announced he would have his deputies hand-count the ballots to see if they match the number of residents recorded as having voted.
If there is a large discrepancy, Bianco said, he will investigate further, possibly by forensically examining voting machines.
The logs that track ballots are preliminary and constitute only “partial data,” said David Becker, who assists election officials around the country as the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. Election officials reconcile the number of ballots they receive with the number of voters they have to ensure their results are accurate, he said.
The sheriff is basing his investigation “on information he either doesn’t understand or is willfully misrepresenting,” Becker said.
Bianco is conducting his probe just before voting gets underway for the June primary for governor. If the number of ballots and voters doesn’t line up, Bianco said he may seek to seize those ballots as well. He said he did not think he would have a conflict of interest even though his name will be on the ballot.
In 2021, a Michigan sheriff took possession of voting machines and a Wisconsin sheriff unsuccessfully pressed for charges against state election officials in an unusual investigation into voting in nursing homes. But election experts could not cite instances of local law enforcement impounding ballots as Bianco has done.
Bianco said he launched his probe of the November election because he couldn’t get satisfactory answers out of Tinoco, who has helped run elections for the county for years. “I have no confidence in anything that he’s telling us,” Bianco said.
Bianco said Tinoco is not a target of his investigation, but he believes he is trying to defend processes that may be flawed.
“It’s almost like you’re talking to your kid and the kid’s just lying to cover a lie to cover a lie to cover a lie,” said Bianco, later adding that Tinoco might not be lying so much as “covering up for a system that he doesn’t want to admit might be wrong.”
Tinoco declined to comment through a county spokesperson. Riverside County Executive Officer Jeff Van Wagenen, a nonpartisan administrator, in a statement said the county has confidence in Tinoco and his team.
Jose Medina, a Democrat who sits on the county’s board of supervisors, said the sheriff is using his ballot review to get “free publicity” for his campaign for governor. He said he fears law enforcement agencies elsewhere in the country will take cues from Bianco.
“I don’t know another word to use than ‘scary,’” Medina said.
State Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) has filed two lawsuits over the sheriff’s probe, saying he has the power to oversee Bianco’s work. He said Bianco had not established probable cause that a crime had been committed.
“He has been deceptive and duplicitous in his actions,” Bonta said in a news conference. “And he seems to be attempting to sow distrust based on some conspiracy theories, and seems to be playing politics — a very dangerous brand of politics — as he runs for governor of the state of California.”
Bianco said his ballot review is part of his job as sheriff and not related to his run for governor. He accused Bonta, who is running for reelection as attorney general, of being a “political activist.”
Becerra and the UCLA Voting Rights Project separately sued Bianco on behalf of four voters in Riverside County. They argue Bianco doesn’t have the power to seize ballots because state law requires election materials to remain in the control of election officials.
Bianco said his ballot review has been put on hold amid the litigation. Two of the cases are pending before the California Supreme Court.
Chad Dunn, an attorney with the UCLA Voting Rights Project, said Bianco is trying to usurp the authority of election officials. Any review of the ballots, he said, should be done through a recount or election litigation that allows members of the public to observe the process — not by sheriff’s deputies operating outside of public view.
“The average American isn’t going to have confidence in the election results that are tallied up in some back room,” Dunn said.
Olivia George contributed to this report.
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