"A legal battle is playing out in California between Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and Democrats who say the Republican gubernatorial candidate’s seizure of more than 650,000 ballots is a political stunt that undermines public trust in voting….Voting rights experts across the political spectrum say the case could have nationwide implications as other Trump supporters and conservative activists push similar – and largely unfounded – accusations of electoral irregularities in an effort to get law enforcement to investigate them.”
The Republican is leading governor's race polls. Voting rights experts across the political spectrum say his case has national implications.
Josh Meyer
USA TODAY
April 3, 2026, 5:34 p.m.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a leading Republican candidate for California governor, seized more than 650,000 ballots from a 2025 special election, prompting a court fight with Democratic state officials who call the action unprecedented and unsupported by evidence.
WASHINGTON – A legal battle is playing out in California between Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and Democrats who say the Republican gubernatorial candidate’s seizure of more than 650,000 ballots is a political stunt that undermines public trust in voting.
Bianco, a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, denies that. He says he’s just doing his job in investigating allegations brought by a conservative citizen group in Riverside County in a special election in California in November 2025.
Voting rights experts across the political spectrum say the case could have nationwide implications as other Trump supporters and conservative activists push similar – and largely unfounded – accusations of electoral irregularities in an effort to get law enforcement to investigate them.
In an exclusive March 31 interview with USA TODAY, Bianco said the publicity surrounding his investigation has prompted elections and law enforcement officials – and conservative groups – to contact his office to see how they can launch similar inquiries.“There are a lot of people reaching out to us from other states, from other counties than Riverside saying the same thing's happening here,” Bianco said. “We have former poll workers saying that there is massive fraud going on … but nobody is looking into it.”
Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department official who is now an elections expert with the organization Advancing American Freedom, which advocates for conservative policies, supported Bianco’s efforts to investigate the claims of a ballot differential.“Anytime there is a discrepancy in ballot totals, it should be investigated to find out whether there were any mistakes, errors, or intentional misconduct in the election,” von Spakovsky told USA TODAY.
“In fact, election officials themselves should be conducting a comprehensive election audit,” he said. “Their failure to do so, resulting in the sheriff having to step in, is evidence of their incompetence or unwillingness to investigate potential wrongdoing.”But Pamela Smith, who heads the voting rights group Verified Voting, said Bianco’s two separate seizures of hundreds of boxes of ballots in March seems more like an “attention grab” than an effort to actually determine whether there was any kind of miscount.
“This is somebody who's running for office in California, and probably more people know his name today than they did a few weeks ago,” Smith told USA TODAY.'There's recourse through normal channels’
Voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50, a ballot measure to redraw congressional districts in Democrats' favor, 64%-36%, in the election in question. In Riverside County, it was 57%-43%.
The state certified the election, and no one questioned its outcome until January. That's when Bianco says he was contacted by a conservative activist group called the Riverside Election Integrity Team (REIT) that had done its own audit of the vote.County records show the registrar of voters initially logged in the receipt of 611,000 mail ballots, according to Bianco, citing the group's audit.
"But when you add up the yes and the no votes, it comes up to 657,000" ballots, Bianco said. That adds up to a 46,000 vote difference "in the number of ballots compared to the number of votes reported.”
"There's no explanation for why it's different," Bianco said. "So we started looking into it."
Bianco's allegations have been disputed by county election officials, who say the real discrepancy was only 103 ballots. They said such claims were based on a misinterpretation of unofficial versus certified ballot totals.
Smith said Bianco is comparing apples and oranges.
The lower number comes from preliminary ballot intake logs that are unofficial and incomplete, she said, and don’t take into consideration things like late-arriving ballots, provisional ballots and cured ballots with questionably matching signature issues resolved. The higher number, according to Smith, includes all of those into one complete, verified – and officially certified – vote total.
"There are a variety of reasons why they come in later, that wouldn't be included in the initial count," Smith said. "If you collaborate with the county, they can walk you through all that.”
Even if such a discrepancy existed, Smith said, the United States − and especially California − have a multilayered system in place for checking election results that Bianco could have used to verify the results.More: After an epidemic of jail deaths, this CA sheriff is running for governor
That includes post-election audits, "ballot accounting and reconciliation procedures" and recounts that can focus on one specific precinct − or the whole state, she said.
"So if they say they had questions about a particular set of numbers, they could have had the election official do a recount," Smith said. "There's recourse through normal channels.”
Instead, Bianco got Riverside County Superior Court Judge Jay Kiel to sign a series of warrants beginning in mid-February authorizing the sheriff to seize the ballots tied to the November election. His department initially seized about 1,000 boxes of ballot materials, including 650,000 ballots from the Riverside County Registrar of Voters, and later seized another tranche after California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, told him to cease and desist.
The court also ordered the appointment of a special master to oversee a ballot count, Bianco said. Bonta, the attorney general, has disputed that, saying the warrant didn't appoint a special master to conduct such a recount. Revisiting elections in Georgia and Arizona, too
California isn't the only place where fights − and investigations − over ballot counting are taking place.
The FBI on Jan. 28 seized 656 boxes of election materials in Fulton County, Georgia, from the 2020 presidential election, widening President Donald Trump’s latest quest to recast his election loss as the product of fraud. Federal authorities also subpoenaed records from the Arizona Senate last month relating to its recount of Maricopa County’s 2020 ballots.The group whose complaint led to the Riverside County investigation, the Riverside Election Integrity Team, has ties to a right-wing group, United Sovereign Americans − members of which have filed lawsuits claiming election fraud or voter registration errors in states across the nation.
The Trump administration's top elections lawyer, Harmeet Dhillon, chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, is cheering on local officials like Bianco for questioning the results of elections and claiming fraud.
“It’s very refreshing to see local law enforcement take action on these types of issues,” Dhillon said on Newsmax March 28. “Too often everyone runs to the federal government, asks us to be the police of everything, but actually this type of thing should be investigated by local law enforcement. So I look forward to seeing what the sheriff and lawyers there find out.”
California state officials respond that Bianco is acting beyond the bounds of his authority.
“This is not normal behavior for any sheriff − and for good reason,” the office of Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat, said in a statement to several news outlets. “They are not elections officials nor equipped to handle these types of investigations.”
In his State of the Union address Feb. 24, Trump declared that “the cheating is rampant in our elections.” Referring to Democrats' opposition to the SAVE America Act voter ID bill, he said: “The reason they don’t want to do it ... is because they want to cheat. There’s only one reason.”
Democrats like California Rep. Pete Aguilar, who chairs the House Democratic Caucus, said in response that Trump and the Republicans are the ones trying to cheat to gain the upper hand in elections.
"Donald Trump and Republicans are attempting to take over free and fair elections. Again," Aguilar and other House Democrats said in a March 19 post on X. "They know it’s the only way they can win."Putting the ballot investigation 'on hold’
On March 30, Bianco issued a statement saying his investigation was "on hold" because of “the politically motivated lawsuits and court filings" that have challenged its validity.
And on April 1, a media coalition including USA TODAY Co. and its Riverside County newspaper The Desert Sun asked a Riverside County judge to unseal the search warrants in Bianco's now-paused investigation so the public can understand the basis of the investigation that led to seizing the ballots.
On Tuesday, in what Bianco said was his first interview since announcing the hold, he told USA TODAY he wants to proceed with the investigation. Bianco said in a follow-up interview April 2 that "an attorney involved in several states across the country" told him other electoral districts have discovered similar anomalies, including a 35,000 to 45,000 differential in mail-in ballots.
Bianco did not immediately respond to questions about the identity of the lawyer and about specifics of their allegations. But he said he suspects it’s a fault in the voting machines, as opposed to intentional fraud. He said state officials are arguing that he lacks the authority to inspect the machinery or even count the ballots.”
Other people are finding this anomaly, too, between the votes counted and supposedly the number of total ballots," Bianco said. "In California, they have passed laws that make it illegal to inspect the voting machines. Tell me how that is even close to transparency − and showing the public that we are open and transparent in our safe and secure elections − when there are laws that say no one, absolutely no one, can ever investigate the validity of the machines?”
California has no such law, but it does have legislation under consideration in Sacramento that would prohibit election officials from permitting a federal government agency or its employees to inspect a voting system machine or device unless authorized by a federal court order. Existing California law does require the election official of any county or city using a voting system to inspect the machines or devices at least once every two years.
Kiel, the Riverside County judge who approved Bianco's request to seize the ballots, has said he would not approve a special master to oversee the case until other legal challenges are resolved, Bianco told USA TODAY.
“You have all of these politicians that are filing lawsuits trying to bankrupt the county of Riverside and the Sheriff's office now to keep us in court, to keep this from happening because they're trying to stop a legal investigation,” Bianco said.
“So now we're just in limbo land,” he told USA TODAY, “because of a, I don't want to say a technicality, but a court process.”
USA TODAY has reached out to the judge for comment.
Who is Chad Bianco?
Known for his blunt rhetoric and big social media presence, Bianco has become a leading candidate in the California gubernatorial race, in part thanks to a fractured Democratic field that includes eight candidates.
Bianco, 58, was first elected sheriff of Riverside County, a vast, arid and politically diverse county just east of Los Angeles, in 2018.
Bianco, who is running on issues such as public safety and election integrity, oversees a department that polices unincorporated parts of the county with a roughly $1 billion budget, managing 12 patrol stations, five jails and the coroner's bureau.The 30-year veteran of the sheriff's office has been a vocal supporter of stricter voting requirements such as voter ID laws, in keeping with Trump’s SAVE Act voting bill.
Bianco also has acknowledged he was once a dues-paying member of the Oath Keepers, the far-right anti-government militia whose leaders were convicted of violently opposing the transfer of presidential power from Trump to Joe Biden during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Bianco has said he joined briefly years ago and did not view the group as extremist at the time.
The sheriff also has been reportedly linked to the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which believes county sheriffs should be the ultimate law enforcement authority in the United States, not the federal government. It is considered an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In his USA TODAY interview, Bianco said he has been investigating the elections system since at least 2022 as part of a broader lack of trust in what he calls overly partisan politics in his Democrat-dominated state.
Bianco’s investigation wasn’t political, he said at a news conference at the time, but rather a “fact-finding mission” to “physically count the ballots” and compare that result with the total votes recorded.
Bonta, the California attorney general, immediately said the ballot seizure was “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.”
“There is no indication, anywhere in the United States, of widespread voter fraud,” Bonta, a Democrat, said in his statement. “Counts, recounts, hand counts, audits, and court cases all support this.”
After the election, local officials had reported only minor discrepancies, a differential of about 100 votes, or about 0.016% of the ballots, according to the county registrar of voters. That finding was in keeping with repeated studies around the country that have concluded voter fraud is extremely rare and almost entirely accidental as opposed to intentional fraud intended to change the outcome.
If Bianco didn’t return the ballots, Bonta said, he’d seek legal recourse.
Not 'trying to work within the system’
Nina Sheridan, a Bonta spokeswoman, told USA TODAY California officials tried repeatedly to work cooperatively with Bianco, including by asking the sheriff to pursue his concerns by working “through the well-established process, overseen by state and local elections officials, of requesting a recount or challenging the results of an election.”
Bianco refused, saying it was his constitutional duty to investigate the issues raised by the citizen group. He wasn’t trying to change the election results, he said, and the probe was court-approved, lawful and would continue.
“By all appearances, this investigation is little more than a fishing expedition meant to sow distrust and undermine public confidence in our elections,” the attorney’s general office said. “This, coupled with the sheriff's willful and open defiance of our office’s lawful directives, demands immediate judicial intervention to prevent further abuse of the criminal process.”
'Not normal behavior for any sheriff’
The court denied Bonta’s petition on procedural grounds, directing him to file it in Riverside County Superior Court where the warrants were issued.
Others joined in Bonta’s effort to shut down Bianco, including the UCLA Voting Rights Project and a lawsuit backed by Xavier Becerra, a former California attorney general who is also running for governor.
In a March 26 filing, Bonta said Bianco had doubled down by seizing an additional 426 boxes of ballots and election materials. A day later, Bonta − after losing an earlier request for an injunction in a lower court − appealed the matter to the California Supreme Court, calling the case an “unprecedented constitutional emergency” and asking for an immediate stay.
The California Supreme Court justices ordered Bianco to file a brief in the case by April 1, and Bonta to file a response by April 3.
Bianco said Kiel – the judge who issued the warrants – told him he couldn't proceed with the case, including the appointment of the special master, until some of the legal questions are resolved.
“We were able to count (ballots) for one day before the attorney general began his cover-up,” Bianco said.