Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco’s sweeping seizure of more than 650,000 ballots from California’s November 2025 election has collided with the state’s highest court, as a voting-rights group, former Attorney General Xavier Becerra, and a rival gubernatorial candidate asked the California Supreme Court to order the ballots returned to election officials.
The challenge was filed Thursday on behalf of four voters whose ballots were seized, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Lawyers for the UCLA Voting Rights Project and Becerra argued that Bianco lacked authority “to seize hundreds of thousands of lawfully cast ballots under the guise of a criminal investigation.” The petition also contends that once ballots are held outside the normal election system, key constitutional promises—especially ballot secrecy—are placed at risk.
At the center of the dispute is Bianco’s position that his action was justified as part of a “fact-finding mission” to determine whether ballots were fraudulently counted. Bianco, a Republican and a leading candidate for governor, has said his investigators planned a physical count and comparison against the totals recorded in the election. In related reporting, Bianco described the task in straightforward terms: physically count the ballots and compare the result with recorded votes.
Bianco’s office has said the investigation began after complaints alleging discrepancies in the vote count, including claims that a local citizens group conducted its own audit and found the county tally overstated by more than 45,000 votes. Those allegations, however, have been publicly refuted by local election officials, who have maintained that the difference between machine results and final totals submitted to the state was much smaller—on the order of about 100 votes.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Bianco’s department took roughly 1,000 boxes of ballot materials from Riverside County on Feb. 26. The materials were connected to the November election and to Proposition 50, which temporarily redrew the state’s congressional districts. The broader political background matters: the proposition was linked to redistricting outcomes after partisan districting battles, including in Republican states such as Texas. While the legal fight concerns the handling of ballots, the controversy has also played out amid heightened attention to how California draws district lines.
Critics of Bianco’s move contend the timing and process were especially troubling. The attorney general’s office reportedly learned midweek that Bianco intended to execute warrants on a Friday, and urged him to slow down and share information about the investigation. Instead, the sheriff’s operation proceeded sooner than planned, the Los Angeles Times reported via an attorney general official speaking on background.
In the Supreme Court filing described by the Chronicle, the UCLA Voting Rights Project emphasized the practical consequences of the sheriff holding the ballots. As long as Bianco retains them, the petition argues, voters lack any expectation that ballot privacy will be protected or that the votes will be accurately tabulated. The court challenge therefore reframes the dispute from a narrow question about whether there was a vote-count discrepancy into a broader issue of who can take custody of ballots and what procedural safeguards are required.
Those concerns are particularly significant because the seizure involved election materials at massive scale, not a limited set of ballots or specific ballots subject to narrowly tailored inspection. The numbers reported by multiple outlets—over half a million and then more than 650,000—underscore the scope of the intrusion into the election system’s normal chain of custody.
Earlier coverage from The Independent described Bianco as seizing more than half a million ballots from a November special election while citing an investigation into an alleged ballot-count discrepancy. That reporting also said Bianco held a news conference explaining that the probe was prompted by a complaint from a local citizens group tied to the ballot count for a November 2025 special election focused on redistricting.
Bianco’s supporters argue that allegations of miscounting—especially when tied to redistricting—warrant aggressive scrutiny, and that a physical comparison of votes could clarify whether the election was properly tabulated. But opponents counter that even if concerns exist, there are rules governing how election materials can be accessed, examined, and preserved. In Bonta’s office’s view, there was not sufficient justification for removing every ballot that was cast in a county as populous as Riverside.
In an interview highlighted by the Los Angeles Times, an attorney general office official said the state was concerned about the adequacy of the justification for seizing every ballot in a largely populated county. The statement captures a key theme likely to resonate with the Supreme Court: whether the means chosen—broad custody seizure—fit the alleged problem.
Now the California Supreme Court will decide whether Bianco’s actions can stand while his investigation proceeds, and whether the ballots must be restored to county election officials. For voters, the immediate stakes are tangible: ballot secrecy, accurate tabulation, and confidence that votes were handled through the legally established election process. For California’s political landscape, the fight also signals how election administration can become a battleground in a year when redistricting and voter trust are already under intense scrutiny.
As the court weighs arguments on authority, privacy, and chain-of-custody safeguards, the dispute will likely determine not just what happens to these ballots, but what limits—if any—exist on law enforcement officials seeking to investigate election outcomes in the middle of a highly contested political cycle.
SHOP AMAZON BEST SELLERS, CLICK TO BUY FROM AMAZON.
SHOP AMAZON BEST SELLERS, CLICK TO BUY FROM AMAZON.
