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 he 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 at a Friday news conference.
Art Tinoco, Riverside County's registrar, told the county’s Board of Supervisors at a lengthy presentation last month that he'd met with the advocates repeatedly about their concerns. He said the citizen group was using imprecise, handwritten records in its audit, which election officials don't use in counting ballots.
When they certify 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 election, the variance between the two was 103 ballots — a 0.016% error rate, which is similar to the rates in 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 National Intelligence Director’s Office has also said it obtained and examined Puerto Rico voting machines last year to look for security vulnerabilities.
Bianco said he has been investigating voter fraud since 2022, adding that "we have not found any mass fraud in Riverside County."
Bianco said at his news conference that 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 that he had concerns about the underlying facts of the investigation and that Bianco 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,” he 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 at New York University School of Law, 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.
Another GOP candidate, former Fox News commentator Steve Hilton, criticized Bonta in a statement without specifically mentioning Bianco, saying he would "lead a complete reset of our election systems to eliminate Democrat corruption and restore fairness and integrity."
Former Rep. Katie Porter, one of the top Democratic candidates in the race, slammed Bianco's efforts.
“California’s election system is one of the best in the world — but my opponent, Chad Bianco, is trying to call it into question to win Donald Trump’s endorsement," Porter said in a statement. "Republican attempts to gin up distrust in our elections is the first page in the authoritarian playbook and it must be stopped.”
In 2024, Bianco endorsed Trump for president in an Instagram video recorded while he was dressed in uniform. California 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.”
