A California sheriff, who is also Republican candidate for governor, seized more than 650,000 ballots from the state’s November 2025 election over the weekend as part of an investigation into voter fraud — a probe officials say he is not allowed to do.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco is scrutinizing the state’s special election on controversial ballot measure Proposition 50 after a third-party organization, the Riverside Election Integrity Team, alleged it discovered roughly 45,000 excess votes in the county.
While California elections officials have dismissed the team’s findings, Sheriff Bianco says his office will conduct another count to see if it can confirm the organization’s claim.
“This investigation is simple: Physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes recorded,” Bianco told reporters at a Friday press conference.
Watch the press conference here:
Proposition 50 was a key proposal pushed by Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom seeking to redraw California’s congressional districts to favor Democrats and counteract a similar effort by Republicans in Texas.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber argued Bianco has no authority to do a recount.
“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, according to the New York Post.
She continued, “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.”
Also, Riverside elections official Art Tinoco rejected the Riverside Election Integrity Team’s conclusion earlier this month, claiming the watchdog group had an incorrect interpretation of how votes are counted on the day of the election.
“Tinoco told county supervisors earlier this year that the initial intake logs by polling workers are meant to be estimates rather than exact tallies of how many votes were cast,” according to the report. “Even so, he said the final tally was within 0.16%, or 103 votes, of the original estimate.”
The integrity team maintains their method was correct, but the disagreement led Bianco to open an investigation of his own. Bianco claimed that California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, tried to intervene in his investigation; however, Bonta claims his office only sought to learn the basis of the probe.
The attorney general told Fox News:
We have attempted to work cooperatively with the Sheriff’s Office in order to better understand the basis for their investigation, including by reviewing the warrants themselves and by requesting the Sheriff’s complete investigative file. We made these requests pursuant to the Attorney General’s supervisory authority over county sheriffs.
During this time, the Sheriff has delayed, stonewalled, and otherwise refused to work with us in good faith. To date, the Sheriff has failed to provide most of the requested documentation. But, what we have been able to learn raises serious questions about the merits of this investigation.
His office added, “We are especially concerned with legal deficiencies in the affidavits underlying the warrants, including the omission of material facts.”
Bianco said Friday he has received multiple letters from Bonta ordering him to stop the election probe.
He called Bonta “an embarrassment to law enforcement” and found it “concerning” that an attorney general would be “outraged” that someone was conducting an investigation into election integrity.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of the Los Angeles crime novel Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
