Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican candidate for California governor who’s among the leaders in recent polls, said his department is moving forward with its investigation into alleged voter fraud in last year’s special election. At a press conference Friday, March 20, Bianco decried what he called state officials’ attempts to interfere with his investigation.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat who’s the state’s chief law enforcement official, called Bianco’s allegations baseless. Bonta said his agency has not tried to interfere, but simply told the sheriff’s department to explain the basis for its investigation.
The allegation of irregularities or fraud in the Proposition 50 special election has been denied by election officials in Riverside County, who say the complaints over a large discrepancy in ballot counts are based on a misunderstanding of the vote-counting process. The issue was first raised publicly by a group with right-wing ties.
Bianco said Friday that the investigation will move forward after a Riverside County Superior Court judge issued an order this week appointing a special master for the investigation.
Bianco, a frequent critic of California’s Democratic leadership, criticized Bonta, saying he’s interfering in the probe, after the sheriff received multiple letters from Bonta’s office in recent weeks ordering him to pause his investigation.
“The outrage that an investigation was happening was extremely concerning to me, especially coming from someone who claims to be a law enforcement officer that is, I’ve said this a minimum of a thousand times, he’s an embarrassment to law enforcement,” Bianco said.
Bianco said the attorney general’s office “could not give me a legal justification to stop a lawful investigation that has been approved and ordered by a judge.” In his letters, the first of which was sent to Bianco on Feb. 26, Bonta cited his supervisory authority over California’s sheriffs in the state Constitution and in state law.
In a statement shared Friday with The Desert Sun, Bonta said he was “surprised and disappointed” by Bianco’s comments at the press conference, adding his office’s attempts to get more information from the sheriff’s office have been met with resistance.
“We were concerned to learn late last month that the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office planned to execute warrants to seize approximately 1,000 boxes of ballot materials pertaining to the November 2025 Special Election,” Bonta said.
Since then, Bonta said, his office has attempted to gain a better understanding of the basis for the department’s investigation, including by reviewing the warrants and by requesting the sheriff’s complete investigative file.
“During this time, the Sheriff has delayed, stonewalled, and otherwise refused to work with us in good faith,” Bonta said. “To date, the Sheriff has failed to provide most of the requested documentation.”
Bonta, whose office has separately been investigating the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department since February 2023 because of a rise in jail deaths and other issues, also raised concerns with the merits of the voter fraud investigation, pointing to “legal deficiencies” in the affidavits for the warrants.
“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.
Bianco says probe has ‘nothing to do’ with run for governor
Bianco said his department’s count was temporarily halted, but will now restart under the court’s supervision. It’s unclear when the investigation could be completed.
Bianco is a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, who has made unfounded claims for years of widespread election fraud. During the press conference, Bianco refuted the notion that his role in the electoral investigation has any connection to his run for governor, with California’s primary election approaching in early June.
“I’m the sheriff of Riverside County. I couldn’t care less what I’m doing in another election, and this has absolutely nothing to do with it,” Bianco said.
“I have a duty to make sure we investigate crime in Riverside County, or alleged crime in Riverside County. So, we will conduct this investigation as thoroughly as possible,” he added.
Bianco said his office is now working with the court to determine the special master, who they will coordinate with for the count.
In his statement, Bonta, who noted there is no widespread voter fraud “anywhere in the United States,” said his office “will take further action, as necessary, to ensure its appropriate resolution.”
What are the allegations?
The complaint in the Proposition 50 special election was first raised by a local group that calls itself the Riverside Election Integrity Team. Greg Langworthy, one of its members, has also been associated with United Sovereign Americans, a group that has challenged election integrity nationwide in lawsuits focused on alleged voter roll errors and other irregularities.
The group said its own review of Riverside County’s ballot records found 45,896 more ballots counted than were documented as received in the Nov. 4 election on Proposition 50, which aimed to counter Republican-led redistricting in Texas by implementing a map favored toward Democrats in California. It was approved by 64.4% of California voters.
But their figure does not take into account the steps ballots go through before they are officially counted, Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco said during an hourlong presentation to the Riverside County Board of Supervisors in February.
While the local group said the ballots cast should equal the ballots counted, Tinoco disputed the group’s approach, as the handwritten intake records are estimates completed by election officers on long nights and are not intended to serve as the final measure of how many ballots were cast.
After ballots are received, voters’ signatures are verified and voter records are updated before ballots are prepared for tabulation. Once ballots are tabulated, the Riverside County Registrar of Voters uses those totals to post daily election result updates starting at 8 p.m. on Election Day.
To find the variance between ballots cast and ballots counted, the registrar of voters compares the number of verified ballots with the number counted before results are finalized. Based on that comparison, Tinoco said the election showed 103 more ballots counted than ballots verified and credited to voters — not 45,896.
He said the variance of 0.016% reflects differences between the county’s ballot tracking system and its vote tabulation system, adding it’s well below an industry standard of 2% adopted by the California secretary of state to account for “reasonable expectations” between ballots cast and ballots counted.
Tinoco said the local advocacy group’s audit also showed a variance because it did not include ballots from conditional registration voters, provisional voters and confidential voters, the latter of which can include police officers, domestic-violence victims and others who could be endangered if their home address was made public.
Asked about Tinoco’s presentation during the press conference, Bianco said the registrar “did not have a definitive answer of what happened,” but rather “gave his opinion of what he thought happened.”
“I’m not saying that anyone’s lying or there’s a series of mistakes,” Bianco said. “I’m saying we don’t know.”
“It makes absolutely no sense to not continue an investigation, especially when both parties are so far apart,” he added. “We’re talking about the difference between having a perfect count and a 45,800-vote difference. That’s massive.”
Warrant served against county’s elections office
At the press conference, Bianco said his office served the registrar of voters with a warrant approved by a judge in early February to obtain election materials related to the 2025 special election.
Bonta took issue with the warrant being executed in a letter sent to Bianco on Feb. 26, saying his office learned just that day about the seized election materials.
Bonta wrote that a member of the state’s Department of Justice requested the sheriff’s department to provide his office with copies of the affidavits supporting the probable cause determining and defer from executing any warrants through March 6 to better understand the basis for the search.
“Instead of briefly delaying execution … we learned this afternoon that you accelerated your timeline and executed the warrants shortly after (the DOJ official) made the request,” Bonta wrote in the letter obtained by The Desert Sun.
In a follow-up letter sent March 4, Bonta said his office learned that Bianco planned to begin counting the seized ballots with sheriff’s department staff “who are not trained and have no experience in counting ballots.”
The sheriff’s office temporarily paused that plan, according to a letter sent from Bonta to Bianco two days later, on March 6. But following the latest court order, Bianco struck a more defiant tone on the issue at the press conference.
“I cannot speak for him or for California DOJ, but I can assure you completely that my investigators definitely know how to count,” Bianco said.
Bianco also referenced the “significance” of the March 6 date until which Bonta ordered the department to cease its investigation, noting it was the filing deadline for “another Democrat” to run against Bonta in his re-election bid for attorney general.
Tom Coulter covers local government for The Desert Sun. Reach him at thomas.coulter@desertsun.com. Jennifer Cortez covers education in the Coachella Valley. Reach her at jennifer.cortez@desertsun.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Chad Bianco and California attorney general clash over election probe
Reporting by Tom Coulter and Jennifer Cortez, Palm Springs Desert Sun / Palm Springs Desert Sun
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