A Republican sheriff in California who's running for governor seized more than 650,000 ballots from election officials last week, saying he is investigating potential fraud in last year's election.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco said a group of citizens conducted their own “audit” of California's 2025 special election results in the county and claimed that the election workers’ tally of ballots received was 45,000 fewer than the number of votes certified to the state.
Riverside County considered one ballot question in the November special election: whether to approve a new Democratic-drawn congressional map. Voters statewide and in the county ultimately passed the measure, putting Democrats in position to gain up to five House seats in this year's midterm elections.
“This investigation is simple: physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes reported,” Bianco said in a Friday news conference.
Art Tinoco, Riverside County's registrar, told the county’s board of supervisors during a lengthy presentation last month that he'd met with the advocates repeatedly about their concerns. He said that the citizen group was using imprecise, hand-written records in their audit, which election officials don't use when counting ballots.
When certifying results, election officials compare tallies from an electronic system that tracks each ballot's journey from officials to voters and back and from separate tabulators that count verified ballots. In the November 2025 election, the variance between the two was 103 ballots — a 0.016% error rate, which is similar to other California counties.
“We are doing an amazing job in Riverside County, don’t know what else we could be doing different,” Tinoco said.
Bianco's investigation comes amid a spate of inquiries into the 2020 election, which President Donald Trump lost. The FBI has seized ballots from an elections hub in Fulton County, Georgia, and subpoenaed materials related to a controversial election review in Maricopa County, Arizona. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has also said it obtained and examined Puerto Rico voting machines last year to look for security vulnerabilities.
Bianco said he's been investigating voter fraud since 2022, adding that "we have not found any mass fraud in Riverside County."
In his news conference, Bianco said the county registrar had indicated that any discrepancy between ballot tallies and the official vote count was due to human error and that the machine count was what was certified as the election's results.
"I hope we can all agree there is no acceptable error small or large in our elections — let alone a 45,000-vote difference," he said. "Our investigation will determine the validity of that alleged discrepancy, and if found true, we will determine the cause."
He also accused California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, of trying to stop his investigation.
In a statement Friday, Bonta said he had concerns about the underlying facts of the investigation and said the sheriff had refused to work with his office on the issue.
“Sheriff Bianco’s investigation is unprecedented in both scope and scale — and appears not to be based on facts or evidence but on unfounded allegations that have already been refuted by the Riverside Registrar of Voters,” Bonta said.
Bonta wrote Bianco several letters about the matter and said he was concerned that the affidavits used to support the warrants may have misled the judge who signed off on them to seize the ballots.
Gowri Ramachandran, an election security expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, said she was concerned that law enforcement would increasingly get involved in election proceedings. She said that could affect routine election processes and risk damage to ballots.
"There are actually legal procedures that people who work for election offices get trained in before they're allowed to touch ballots," she said.
Bianco is one of the leading Republicans running for governor in California this year. While California is a deep-blue state, Democrats have expressed concern that their party's crowded field of candidates could shut them out from the general election. In California, candidates from all parties appear on the same primary ballot, with the top two vote-getters advancing.
Bianco was elected sheriff of Riverside County, in Southern California, in 2018 and 2022.
In 2024, Bianco endorsed Trump for president in an Instagram video filmed while he was dressed in uniform. California state law prohibits officers and public employees from participating in "political activities" while wearing an official uniform.
“I think it’s time we put a felon in the White House,” he said at the time. “Trump 2024, baby. Let’s save this country and make America great again.”
