A clash between the California Attorney General’s Office and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco over an investigation into the 20025 Proposition 50 election continued unabated Friday, March 27.
Bianco, who is also running for governor as a Republican, has seized more than 650,000 ballots from the Riverside County Registrar of Voters to look into allegations of voter fraud.
His actions have sparked lawsuits from the AG’s Office and others. Attorney General Rob Bonta has called the investigation baseless and said the sheriff had previously resisted his office’s attempts to get more information.
What Sheriff Chad Bianco is investigating in the 2025 election
A local group calling itself the Riverside Election Integrity Team first raised allegations of widespread voter fraud after its review of the Proposition 50 election. The group said a discrepancy of 45,896 votes existed between the final vote count and handwritten records of hand-counted ballots.
“The investigation is going to determine what the discrepancy is,” Bianco said during a news conference on March 20, according to KQED. “Is it human error? Is it machine error?”
What is the Riverside Election Integrity Team and the United Sovereign Americans?
The Riverside Election Integrity Team is a local volunteer group that says it reviews election procedures and vote counts for possible errors or irregularities. Members of the group have questioned the accuracy of official results in several elections and have pushed for hand-counting ballots and greater public oversight of election systems.
The Riverside group draws inspiration from the United Sovereign Americans, a national nonprofit organization that has supported similar efforts in multiple states. The group has assisted local election integrity organizations by providing data analysis, training, and legal strategy aimed at identifying what it claims are weaknesses in election administration.
Voting rights advocates and election officials have criticized the organization and its affiliates for promoting unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, while the group has said it is focused on transparency and compliance with election laws.
What election officials say about the alleged ballot discrepancies
Riverside County Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco told the Board of Supervisors in February that handwritten ballot intake records are estimates and are not intended to be final tallies.
Ballots are not officially counted until the signatures have been verified, Tinoco said. Once verification is complete, they are compared with the previous count to determine the variance. Tinoco said the election had 103 more ballots than those that had been verified, a variance of 0.016%.
He attributed the difference to variations in the county’s ballot-tracking and vote-tabulation systems.
He added that the Riverside Election Integrity Team did not include ballots from conditional registration voters, provisional voters, and confidential voters, which include police officers and domestic violence victims who would become endangered if their addresses are made public.
Why Attorney General Rob Bonta tried to pause the sheriff’s investigation
When the Attorney General’s Office learned Bianco had seized ballots to investigate alleged voter fraud, it ordered the sheriff to pause all work and hand over the case file.
Bonta said in a lawsuit submitted to Riverside Superior Court his office had “grave concerns about the legal sufficiency” of the two search warrants used by the sheriff to seize the ballots. He was also concerned about damaging public confidence in elections, which could result from a “poorly supported criminal investigation.”
Bonta said in the lawsuit that Bianco “willfully violated” his office’s directive and improperly continued the investigation.
In fact, another search warrant was obtained on March 19 despite the class with the Attorney General.
“The Sheriff’s statements repeatedly confirmed the Attorney General’s concern with his criminal investigation—that the Sheriff lacked probable cause to believe that anyone has committed a crime,” the lawsuit states. “Rather, he told the public that the purpose of the investigation is ‘just as much to prove the election is accurate as it is to show otherwise,’ and that it was simply a ‘fact-finding mission’ — which is a starkly insufficient basis to embark on a criminal investigation.”
What the appeals court decided — and what it didn’t
Bonta initially sought a court order from the state appeals court to stop the investigation, but the court quickly moved to deny the motion.
However, the court did not rule on the merits of the case. Rather, the court said Bonta’s office had failed to demonstrate a remedy could not be found in the county superior court.
Appellate courts are not typically fact-finding courts and usually step in only after a trial court’s decision.
“The Court of Appeal’s decision was based solely on where we filed the case and is not a ruling on the underlying merits of the petition,” Bonta’s office said in a statement.
What happens next in the legal fight between the sheriff and the state?
Bonta has filed another lawsuit in Riverside Superior Court. A hearing to expedite the case schedule was held on Friday, March 27. Online records did not indicate the result of the hearing.
Meanwhile, Bianco seized additional ballots on Tuesday, a defiant move as state officials sought to shut down the investigation.
The sheriff says his investigators will attempt to recount the results to verify the election’s validity. The Attorney General’s Office has shown no signs of stopping its resistance to Bianco’s efforts.
Sam Morgen covers the city of Palm Springs for The Desert Sun. Reach him at smorgen@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Here’s why California AG clashes with Riverside sheriff over ballots
Reporting by Sam Morgen, Palm Springs Desert Sun / Palm Springs Desert Sun
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